Emotional Intelligence: Curse or Gift?

No feeling understood can be the source of great pain. It is a symptom for many mental diseases, such a Borderline Personality Disorder, Bipolar Disorder, Social Anxiety and more. Not being understood leads to the loneliness that we humans dread so much. Feeling a bit lonely from time to time appears to be a normal part of life and nothing to stress out about. It is not like anyone who ever feels lonely has a serious mental issue. But when is feeling lonely an actual problem? When is the pain that it causes too big to be ignored? Being honest I think this has a lot to do with how the individual experiences the loneliness. But at the point, where it seems that the isolation starts to swallow everything it is definitely a problem.

Now, where does this all-threatening loneliness come from? Throughout history there have been brilliant minds such as Van Gogh who suffered from severe mental disorders and loneliness and yet were extraordinary personalities. And we see a pattern: many artists showed this issue. But why artists? Is there something, that makes artists different from other people? Something that makes them lonely? I think there is.

It is “emotional Intelligence” and I am honest I do not like the term. It is the ability to “see deeper”. Yeah, what the heck does “see deeper” mean. It means, that an artists sees connections that others don’t. And this is why that person can be an artist in the first place: As an artist, we do not define the world newly (though some do create worlds), but we find extraordinary connections between ordinary things in life. We shed a new light on the existing world.

But this “seeing connections that others don’t” is making artists lonely. Because we think differently. The way we perceive the world is different. We feel the world differently. And often times, we cannot explain why. We are not able to tell, why this beautiful sunset moved us to tears and the people around us do not understand. We keep asking fundamental questions. We challenge reality day after day. This is what cannot be understood. Why ask the same questions over and over. Why do we see connections between separate things in reality? And sometimes, we do not even know why we just happened to know what is going on in another person. We do not know how we could find the right words to comfort them. But we probably just saw those subtle hints in the world around us and without even realizing what we were doing, we followed our “Intuition” and did the right thing.

I am throwing around words like intuition and emotional intelligence and some might still not know what it is and say that these are not scientific concepts. Well no, they are not. But intuition and emotional intelligence in essence is the ability to make connections between things. And because it is something that not everyone has to the same extent it can make a person lonely.

But there is a bright side to it: in many sciences making connections between things is crucial for progress, which means that people with high emotional intelligence have a higher probability of understanding science faster. Note that it is only the the likelihood that is affected, because it is possible, that someone has high emotional intelligence and is great at human interaction, but has problems with math, because those two fields are so different.

However if we have high emotional intelligence, we have at least some area in our life, where we see connections that others don’t. This allows us to be better in that field than other. And this is a fact that we can draw energy from. We may not always be understood. But in turn we are allowed to have a deep understanding of the world, which I personally find overwhelmingly beautiful.

Happy by Choice

I have spoken about positivity before. And in my last post I talked about how a vision can help fighting negativity. So I thought I might elaborate on being happy a little more. Because I find, that I choose to be sad and hurt and angry most of the time. I let all those negative emotions get to me. And feeling them is not evil per se. But there is a limit to it. And we overstep that limit, if we find ourselves, being more sad than we are happy.

Please do not get me wrong. I am not saying that someone who for example suffers from depression is choosing to be sad. I think we all have phases in our life, where choosing to be happy is pretty much impossible. We all have to decide for ourselves, whether or not we are able to work on choosing happiness… because we really are not always in a position to do so. But sometimes we are. And I think, if we can, we should be happy.

But how? I think it is a mindset. It means that we focus our mind on the positive. Like our vision of ourselves. Or the beautiful sunset. Being positive by choice means choosing to not complain. I often do that. Just complain about everything. Finding a reason to pick on everyone around me. And yes: I know this is toxic behavior. This is why I am trying to work on it. Because at some point I realized, that complaining is for immature people. Because either we do something about whatever is annoying us, or we shut up. Why talk about something that makes us unhappy and thereby remind us why we could be unhappy? There is literally no benefit to it. There are so many awesome things in this world we can go on and on about for hours. That will wake the fascination and love in us and make us feel happy. Why talk about something that does the exact opposite? Sure sometimes we need to face a problem. I am not talking about productive criticism. I am talking about pointless complaining.

I used to carry this stone to University with me every day. I used to have it right next to me while I studied. Just to remember that I was not being forced to do that. But that I had chosen this myself.

The next step of being happy by choice is believing that we can do, whatever we want to. It is working on us becoming the person we want to be. Becoming our vision of ourselves. Sure thinking we are absolutely invincible is not helpful either. Some occasional “If I do not work hard enough I will fail.” is perfectly normal. But can you see what this sentence implies? It actually comes from the mindset of “I can do this.” because it gives the condition under which we fail. Not the condition under which we succeed. And it also implicitly explains how to not fail: Work hard enough. So, if we doubt ourselves, which is normal. Let’s try to figure out in what cases we fail and formulate it such that the very same sentence that presents the problem holds the solution.

Now why would we go through all that trouble with all those details? Why does it even make a difference how exactly we put our doubts into words? Because what we say has a direct impact on our mind. And positivity is a mindset. So formulating the problem alongside with our solution will make ourselves understand that there is a solution to whatever problem we are facing.

So choosing to be happy in the end comes down to acting and talking like a happy person. Because after doing that for a week or two. Our minds believe us that we are happy. Doing this alongside with having a good vision of who we want to be, sets us up to actually becoming happy. And it boosts confidence incredibly. This I say from experience. I am not just rambling here… I once was very happy. I once had pretty much reached my vision. I stopped being positive. And I stopped being happy. Ever since I have been trying to get back into that positive mindset.

All I am saying is: it is possible to be happy. Despite everything that is hard. Despite all the pain that comes our way. Because happiness can be worked for. Yes, there are times, when all we do is try to get through the next day. Through the next night. Through the next our. Next minute. Without hurting ourselves. Without hating ourselves. But when we finally wake up from our pain. We need to remember that positivity is a choice. A mindset. One that we need. Because it will make us happy.

Tortured by Fear

Imagine sitting in a dark room. Alone. Without sound, but the beating of your racing heart. And it does not stop. You try to control your breath. Slow your heart down. But fear keeps rushing it. From time to time you seem to see the walls around you moving. Closing in on you. Maybe they will crush you one day. But there is nothing you can do. Nothing. No sound. No smell. No heat. No cold. Just fear. Parallelizing you.

This is how my days feel right now. I am trying to distract myself. I am trying. It does not work. I cannot speak about my fear. I am not allowed to. I cannot. It will go away. Hopefully. I keep telling myself, it will be alright. And I know I might be lying to myself.

No, I do not want to cut. I want to end it for good. A few months ago this thought scared the hell out of me. I remember thinking, that “I would never do it… but this was exactly what I thought, before I started cutting.” Now the thought does not scare me. Because I am so busy being tortured by fear. I still don’t think, I could kill myself. But… I wish I was faced with the choose of my life and someone else’s. I’d gladly choose to safe the other person.

The people closest to me. The whole world. I am not mad at anyone. I am not disappointed in anyone. These emotions I only have for myself. I still love. The beauty. The people close to me. I still wish to protect them. Who I hate is myself. All I want is to escape the fear. I know I cannot. I know I just have to wait. Be patient. And… When this all is over. I will have suffered enough from this anguish to forgive myself. I will go on with my life.

But for now… for now I am in a dark room. With walls closing in on me. With me trying to distract myself from that very room. Trembling. Shivering. And nothing I can do. Nothing.

Fighting with Kindness

When someone calls us “sweety” over and over again, we want to rise to that expectation. We want to become sweeter, kinder and nicer. At least that is what I experienced. And I think that with us trying to be kind in general, we will also be more likely to be kind to ourselves. And this is where we win. Because this can protect us from hurting ourselves. This ties into the overall mindset of positivity. Which I find is so crucial to recovering from all this hate towards ourselves that we fuel.

Let’s take a step back. What the heck is female energy? To me it is the desire to take care and protect those who need protection. Those who are close to our hearts. It is the wish for peace. The wish for a safe home. The need for beauty around us. The will to be sweet and cute. It is not unique to women at all. It is that it is women who we are seeing protraying that engery, most times.

Female energy is in strong contrast to us trying to be strong. Pushing on. Forcing everything beyond the limits. Female energy aims to preserve the beauty. It is not weak. It is just less aggressive, less outgoing. It aims at the peace and protection rather than trying to conquer the world.

And this is exactly, why it is so good at helping us to fight self-harm: it is an energy that will drive us to preserve ourselves.

Now, how can we connect to that drive? In the rush of our world we always try to be tougher. We are constantly competing never calming down. Never appreciating the beauty around us. And that is exactly where we need to start: In seeing the flower on our way to work. On seeing the colors of a sunset. And realizing how beautiful it is. Because we cannot try to protect the beauty if we do not see it.

But we do not only need to see the beauty around us. While that is all well and good and important to lift our spirits, even more important is to see the beauty within ourselves. Now that is the hard part. Because we all have flaws and we tend to see them waaaaay more than we see how awesome we really are. And I’ll not ask anyone to lie to oneself, because that will not help either and might even be a source for self-hatred. So no lying. But then how are we supposed to see the good in us?

For me there are many things. I have found that clothes can help a lot. Simple things like putting on a cute piece of clothing like a lace-top, or painting my nails. Putting on a smile. Telling someone close to me I love them, or patting my pet. All those things can work wonders. Because we can look in the mirror and see a nice person. Someone who is worth protecting.

Honestly, I think telling ourselves, that we are wonderful, is something we forget is legit. Because it has nothing to do with obsessing about one’s looks. But with accepting who we are. And creating that person, we want to be. And there is nothing wrong with that. There is nothing wrong with slowing down our lives, to appreciate what is around us. To appreciate what and who we love. And to appreciate who we are.

And this appreciation. That awareness. That wish to be kind will connect us to our female energy. It will make us happier people. And as we are happier and smile more, we will become more beautiful, more amazing and will notice that change. We will notice the positive mindset we have towards ourselves. And along with this we will be empowered. We will start being at peace with ourselves, instead of being at war. And hand in hand with that, our desire to harm ourselves will begin to fade.