Alexithymia

There's more to living than being alive.

If you really absorb that sentence, it's pretty powerful.  Think about a typical weekday in your life.  Don't you cruise through it on autopilot?  There are most likely a few bright moments, a couple laughs, possibly (if you're lucky) things you're living for, and darkness.  Are you really living each moment, or are you just alive?  Admittedly, I'm the latter on most of my days.  I'm a weekend warrior, something I promised myself when I was a teenager that I'd never become.  It seemed when I was younger that working all week to live life on the weekends was cheating yourself out of life somehow.  I think my younger self had some great insight that got drowned out by the need to pay the bills as years came and went.

I have a tendency to keep my feelings bottled up inside, with an inevitable explosion happening every once in a while like the occasional dropped soda bottle.  Shouldn't I be more vocal?  Shouldn't we all?  Shouldn't life be more than stops and starts?  Mundane Monday to Friday with jam-packed weekends that leave us more drained than refreshed?  I think as adults, we find it hard to voice our feelings... Or to really feel things.  We block things out in order to get through the day.  That's not the kind of person I want to be.  I want to really feel things, to really express my emotions.  I want to live for more than just 48 hours per week and have a full, vibrant life.

Feeling emotions fully means taking the bad with the joyous, but there's nothing wrong with that.  One tempers the other.  I just have to find the strength to really live each moment, and not just get through life being alive.  Now the question is:  How?