“Your emotions are the slaves to your thoughts, and you are the slave to your emotions.” Elizabeth Gilbert

I can’t say with confidence that I’m clear on where our emotions come from; but I know with absolute certainty that we are all slaves to the master that is our emotional state. That isn’t to say that we can’t gain control of our emotions – anyone who has lived has surely done this through one or more of the various means available to us. I have certainly tried many, the most notable of which was starving my body. The sudden and dramatic effect was more effective than I could have imagined; as is true of the consequences I had to face in the aftermath.

I walk around the world feeling like a ball of fire, uncontrollably spewing out hot flames of emotion. Though there is often immense beauty to be found as a result, the chaos of it all seems entirely counterproductive in most of my day to day to life. One of my aims here, in my writing, is to decode my emotions, thoughts and behaviour, and put them into some sort of order so that I can channel my time and energy into something that is going to get me towards some defined goal. It isn’t that I need to achieve any particular goal, it’s more about moving forward on a chosen path. To be sure, there are times for standing still, perhaps even for looking back, but I have been buried in the past for longer than I can remember and now, for me, I feel compelled to put one foot in front of the other.

All of this is to say that I am conflicted as to how best to manage my emotions so that I can leverage them, rather than being hindered by them.

I’ve been fascinated by the work of Dr Gabor Mate whose argument against ignoring or repressing emotions is, in my opinion, hard to dispute. But clearly for me, feeling my emotions so strongly, so much of the time, comes with it’s own material consequences that make this equally unsustainable.

Though I have waded through literature across various fields to find answers, I do not have any clear framework in mind as to how best to move forward in dealing with a perpetual state of emotional turbulence. And that makes sense to me; I find it very strange when people look to some artificial framework that one respected individual or another has ‘created’. I use the word created in inverted commas because whether it’s a business blueprint, a diet plan, a fitness regime or a study schedule, these things all take age old wisdom that we all have access to simply by being human, and market it in some new shiny package. But maybe I’m wrong; maybe there is a very good reason why framework are used to make progress, and perhaps this is exactly what Alan was talking about when he says that we need “a certain kind of order”.