Meltdown Mode

So, (trying hard to comment objectively, aloof from myself)

I'm kind of in emotional meltdown mode today. I should be studying, but I'm not. I know it will pass, it always does (Praise be to Christ!), but that doesn't make it any easier when it does come, this churning sea of emotional turmoil. Maybe it's the fact that I discussed these pieces of art (among) in my art exam this morning.

The Justice of Emperor Otto III - Dirc Bouts the Elder
Venus and Mars Bound by Love - Paolo Veronese

Morning in the Riesengebirge - Caspar David Friedrich

On the Sailboat - Caspar David Friedrich

Or maybe I chose to discuss them because of this mood. At any rate, they were the paintings I found most simple to explain at length last night and today.

Good grief! I think I just want to cuddle into some solid warm sympathetic something and weep a little. I'm not sad, I'm just, I don't know. It sounds very silly and childish, but I've come to accept tears as an honorable outlet rather than a shame. They are substitutes for the words I can't say, don't even know how to say.

Some day, maybe I'll learn to be the strong woman I've tried to be since I was little. Back then, it was so easy to be Joan of Arc, Molly Pitcher, or other female patriots or saints of my fancy. Then, bang, something hit me at about 13 years old, started throwing me around at 15, and totally disoriented and hung me up by my thumbs at 16-17. Coming out of 17, I learned to ride the waves, predict them, and even to occasionally keep my mouth shut when the sea starts pitching. Now, I've become familiar to the point that the emotional upheaval is like an old annoying aquaintance. I know each feeling and what sorts of things it feels when it comes. I've learned to recognize that my reason does not control my "rational" thought during certain phases of my life. I'm becoming better at riding out the torrent, and waiting for a better day.

This is perhaps, my biggest point of contention with the Thomists I know: namely that man's thoughts and actions are rational (This may or may not reflect Aquinas: I can't even think about him right now.). You see, my thoughts were once rational. But sometimes, it is as if something else has hijacked my mind and completely turned my senses haywire. I'm in control, but it's not my rational me, or at least, it's a different rational me that's not rational. Then, say those Aristotelian men who've probably never undergone such an ordeal, it's your passions getting the better of your reason. But it's not. It's not a drive or a desire or a seeking the good. It's a whole different way of reasoning where logic doesn't satisfy or console, where this unreasonable reason takes control of one's mouth while the other reason cries in the background, "I don't really mean that. I'm so sorry. How, why does this other reasoning control me for these brief spans?" Deep down inside, I realize that my thoughts are incoherent and my words even less so.

It is so frustrating to live with two reasons - a reasonable and an unreasonable. Right now the unreasonable one wants me to unreasonably mourn a road I didn't take. But even that will pass, by God's grace.

TWO roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

Robert Frost.

Thanks to ODLBN for his wisdom and encouragement.