I never seemed to have the appropriate emotion at the appropriate time, feeling little even when close relatives died. When I was a couple years sober, I was teaching my class at a Catholic high school in Sydney when one of the brothers came to the classroom door with a message that one of the nicest boys in my class had been hit by a car and killed on his way to school. I was asked not to tell the class right away but broke down and found tears filling my eyes when I tried to get back to teaching. In a way, it was embarrassing, but also a tremendous relief, with emotion that which had been dammed up for years being released, relieving me of the pressure that had built up over that time. My emotions are still a bit quirky but I am not ashamed of them, finding they do no harm and sometimes even tell me something useful. There is an self-help fellowship for people with mental illness here called GROW which has a saying I like which is, "Feelings make good servants and even better friends, but terrible masters." |