not always & not when you walk by

I don’t think anyone has even once tried to identify the songs from which my post titles are taken. You know what, guys? Poor show. I’m just saying it now: did I expect more? Yes, yes I did. Welcome back to blogging, you say? Thanks, but that doesn’t make up for anything.

Exam time is winding down now, but it brought with it the usual wave of seemingly unrelated, like definitely unrelated, like there is definitely an external and totally not-exam-related cause for this, emotional exhaustion. Strangers have walked into bathrooms to find me sitting meekly on the floor, to the left of the hand-dryer, with my face in my hands. This is an exam-time thing for me. I think it’s not, but it is. It probably doesn’t help that the night before some exams I saw fit to drink fairish quantities of red wine and talk about my feelings, but that’s not the problem. Exams are the problem, and now there’s only one problem left, and it’s on Thursday and then it will be done.

If there’s one thing we’re genuinely really shit at as human beings, I think it’s recognising why we have the feelings we have. I accept reluctantly that not everyone goes around bleeding feelings out of their eyeballs like I do, and I think they are probably upstanding and excellent human beings who are almost definitely more productive than self, but I also know for a fact there are other feelingsy type people around and we are all almost universally really horribly terrible and bad at diagnosing where these feelings come from.

What we’re really good at, is making up the best and most convenient reasons for how we feel. It’s like arts and crafts, but instead of glue, mental instability! We choose people to be in unrequited love with, and then we make all our feelings about unrequited love, like if this arbitrary person loved us, we would be happy, but they never will love us, because that is the reason that we chose such a person. Or we ascribe our feelings of dissatisfaction to our inadequate work ethic, like if we just worked harder, HAPPINESS, but we never will work harder, because we’re too unhappy. These are classics, but there are many more available to choose from. You can invent your own, as long as the cause of your sadness explains everything conveniently and is utterly beyond your control.

What you’re feeling is probably just a feeling. If that doesn’t make sense, it’s because we’re not supposed to.