My "queer" attraction

This is what happens when the instrument that am supposed to work with breaks down in lab and i have literally little to do in lab. i sit and think. i was thinking about my guilt feeling that i sense as i am getting paid by the government to do science but am not doing it (not entirely my fault, i did not break the instrument after all). and as i think about work related guilt, thought expands and i start thinking about guilt in general. how the society guilt trips us for everything we do. this is to such an extent sometimes i think if something feels  good, I know i must feel guilty for having that thing. i will talk about one particular guilt that i feel all the time. i am already feeling guilty for saying this in public, fearing and anticipating people will think i am "crazy" (sorry for using this word, i just read an article posted by a friend on Facebook and am trying not to use disability as a slang).  Anyway as am half of the time this “who gives a shit” kind of super radical person (the other half am conservative, confused or stereotypically), will go ahead and write it down.

So this “guilt” that I feel is for finding people (read men) attractive. As soon as I realize I find someone physically and/or sexually attractive the tremendous guilt becomes so overwhelming that I consciously start avoiding that person. There are several internal reasons for this guilt, but first I will talk about how others fan this guilt. It has happened several times that am taking a walk with a friend and a guy passes by us and I just say “oh! He is cute”. Obviously I do not say it shouting, but in a volume that I and may be my friend can hear it. The immediate response (totally unwanted) that I mostly get from my friends is “oh my god! But he is a kid”! The indication is as if am a pedophile and just raped someone. And my immediate reaction would be to feel extremely guilty about my attraction. But I have decided from now on I will fight the guilt, for several reasons. One, it is not my “fault” that I like men younger than me, go and open my brain up and fix the chemical reaction if it is so offensive. Two, just calling someone cute does not mean I will drag him to my bed and start having sex, it’s just a comment (although I know it as well that it is not a crime to feel sexually for someone, as long as I wait for consent and do not impose myself, stop sex shaming).  This happens more often if I make the same comment for someone who is already “taken” (yes if you did not know we are like a bag of potatoes that someone can own, UGH!). The first reaction from within and from surroundings is “how could you even think of liking him! The next thing you will try is to break them up”. (This whole reaction reminds me of a hilarious comment one of my older relatives made some time back. We were talking about a Bengali movie showing how a middle aged married woman falls in love with a young guy and the whole hypocrisy of the society about that. And this older guy just looked at me and said, this kind of feeling might happen with French women but our women (Indian) are pure!! ) First of all grow up and stop being melodramatic and stop making 1960s Bollywood movies, where the vamp in black dress, black lipstick and cigar will seduce the hero and the “poor” man will get distracted and at the end the vamp will pay for her sins and will die and repent.   Going back to the original topic, the guilt, there are lots of assumptions when this guilt is triggered. First of all and once again, just liking does not lead to me acting on it and trying to “break” people up. Second, just because that person is with someone else that does not “de-validate” my feelings. Its not my fault that I did not meet them when they both were single.  Third and most importantly, the assumption that these two people in love are completely unable to love more than one individual is so Victorian, and we all (including me) need to remember all the time things like bisexuality, polyamory, open relationships exist (yes they do however alien these might sound). And of course am not saying that I need to assume the other extreme (that everyone is bi, poly or open). Just be respectful to the people you find attractive as well as to your attraction and there are plenty of decent ways of having a conversation expressing interest and being open to both yes and no.  So what I am recently trying is, being mindful of my attraction, trying to understand if it is just a physical thing or both physical and intellectual. Once that is worked out it seems having the conversation is much easier and when the guilt is taken out from attraction, magically the objectification disappears (for me that happens, not sure if that is a psychologically validated thing). So as a caution, I do tell people these days when I find them attractive, please do not get offended or assume or read between my words. In general am a person who respects others and expect the same in return, hence the chances are slim that I would go overboard and do anything outside my own boundary.  

Just writing these things down and putting in public makes me feel more comfortable with my own feelings.  I feel more open to ideas and validated about attraction. Attraction is a “queer” chemical reaction that takes place faster than social seasoning and unless we keep questioning our social conditioning we will keep having conflict between feeling and acting on it. 

whisper in my ear the name...

I get to talk about sex a lot, but whenever the topic of love comes up I feel I have no entitlement to talk about it. After all in last five years or so I have been in love too many times. Sometimes I lose count and hence feel less legitimate to talk about it. Legitimacy, a strange word, which decides on the basis of average how we individually should behave. Granted, of all the loves that I felt, many were infatuations, but that does not discount my legitimacy to talk about it. As I did experience love, this truth came to me last night in a very strange still mundane way. And hence I sit down to write about my love, fragmented stories from this period have been told to so many but I never felt I have the right to talk about love. But today I know I do. I am listening to a song, a love song, written a century back, there is something magical in the voice and the instruments, as it broke open the darkness in me and the pure flow of joy makes me smile, though he is not with me, and we have no intention of getting together. But still love existed and that is the joy. The song “whisper, tell me in my ears the name that plays in your soul” took me back to a small room, with just one bed and a desk, and that damp feeling. It was his room in his residence, it took me back to the smell and feel of that room, and took me back to that evening when we two first touched each other. Our lips trembled in joy and in fear, fingers intertwined, and heart racing. We both made love to other people before, but in that moment everything was new, the pain, the longing, and the fact that finally we were there, “tell me, pour in my ears the name that fills your soul”.

I do not know why am I writing this today, not to validate, not to justify and not to prove, I just felt, it is a story worth telling. Everything in our love actually started with a song, his first text to me, after talking online and receiving my one sided texts for a long one year, was a song. That evening in November, looking at the setting sun, I sent him a text, a line from an old love song “I will not tie you with my charm…” and after couple of minutes the magic happened, he replied, from the same song “let me tie you with my love”. I was 29 he 25, but the story seems so juvenile. Then we met, and love happened so naturally. Though he always told me my driving to his place at the middle of the night on his birthday, with a small cupcake, and forgetting to get a matchbox and hence calling him to ask if he has one as I pretended to be a forgetful new smoker did the magic. On that cold January night we fell in love.

We were different, we still are, very, and we fought. He would hardly show his emotions, and it was left to me to know what he felt by looking at his eyes, ah! Those dark-deep eyes! I did read his emotions every time. We found a song for us, our love and our fights, once again an old one “I lose you every moment, oh my love! To find you anew”. I remember our trip together to the forest of North Bengal, in the train we wanted to share a seat, but could not because other people were there before us. We looked at each other and listened “I lose you my love every moment, to find you anew” the whole way. That trip was magical, the walks we took by the river on a spring full moon night, the cold air, and our walks without a single spoken word, but sharing thousand thoughts.

Then I remember the day we broke up, or may be the day before, we two separated by thousands of miles, and millions of misunderstandings and rage and anger. I was listening to a song, “you have me my love but still fear to lose” and I had to call him at the middle of his work day, just to tell him about the song, and then to break up. He did not fight, as he would never show emotions, and in a long time I refused to read his emotion, after all those dark deep eyes were not in front of me.

Several years have passed since we broke up, we have a very strange and bitter relationship since then. When you are so close and then the closeness is not there, perhaps you do not want anything else. We both have moved on, to me he has come back several times as a thought, a desperation to have him back, an anger, dismissal. For him I have always been a rage, for not reading his emotions that night we broke up perhaps. But how strange it is, after so many years, our love came back to me through a song, “tell me, and whisper in my ears the name that resonates in you”. It came back as calmness, as joy and as an understanding, yes I know what love means. I was in love and I was loved. 

Can we not have a conversation?

I was visiting my friend’s place recently, to meet her two kids, one girl of eight and a boy of three or four. Before going there I was trying to buy gifts for the kids, and trying too hard to buy gender neutral gifts. In a fairly “liberal” world that we think we live in, I found it incredibly difficult in even kid’s gifts that would not impose gender on them. Anyway I ended up buying chocolates, thinking everyone irrespective of gender and race loves chocolate.

When I got to her place, I was warmly greeted by her eight year old daughter, in her cute pink leggings and bouncing pigtail. Though she and I seldom met, she loved hanging out with me and we always managed to have a great time. While we reestablish our friendship and my friend was busy making me tea, I hardly noticed the shy little boy standing in the corner and looking at us. I did not even notice his presence until the time came when I realized I actually did not give the kids their gifts!! So I pulled out the packs from my bag and immediately one of the packs was proudly owned by my pig-tailed friend. When I turned to the boy holding the pack out for him, his eyes did light up but he was too shy to come and get it from me. Right then when was thinking how can I make friends with this little chap, I heard his sister harshly taunting him “are you a GIRL or what?” before I could believe my ears, she turned to me and started telling how embarrassing he was, he liked to play with her dolls, liked to wear her clothes, and even sometimes wanted to wear lipsticks, “what a loser he is!” While this eight year old spilled her embarrassment with her brother, I time traveled in past, suddenly I felt the clothes on me are too big and I did not have graying hair or glasses anymore, I was standing in my parents’ drawing room and my father shouting at me “For god’s sake be a MAN”. I did not know what did I do this time, I just felt tears welling up in my eyes, I looked at my sisters for support, and saw them giggling at me mocking. I tried hard to figure out what did I do wrong? Was it because I wore my mother’s necklace the other day when no one was home? Or may be somehow they got to know how I loved wearing my ma’s black and golden sari?  Or maybe because when my sisters and I were playing picnic I chose to be the mother and cook for them? I raced my four year old memory but still could not find what did I do wrong this time? I wish I had the brain of a thirty three year old back then and could say DAMN IT! Maybe I find colorurful outfits more attractive than my dull blue shirt and half pants, maybe I feel close to my mother as she never tells me am weird and so wear her stuff and feel connected to her. Whatever be it I just caould not figure out what did I do wrong and stood there in complete embarrassment. While all these thoughts were storming my brain my friend brought a tray with food and tea, and the aroma of tea dragged me back to present, where I saw the kids enjoying their chocolates, oblivious of all the insults and hurts that just happened two minutes back.  

My friend and I quietly start sipping on our tea and she sensed what was going in my head. After all she has been a big support in my coming out process. So before I could start a conversation, she told me she was fine with the possibility of her son eventually coming out as a gay man, and she would support him always. But this was not the right age for him, he would have to wait until he grew up and understood what it meant. After all I cannot expect her to talk to a 3 year old about SEX! “Wait”, the key word here, wait till he grows up, wait till the society around him tells him he is weird and is wrong and needs to be fixed, wait till he tries to kill himself as he is mad and confused, and finally when the wait is over, that magical day comes, when suddenly he gathers all his courage and wisdom to go against everything and in spite of fearing losing his closest friend, his mother, he tells her while they eat breakfast “ma I like men”. And then she will support him, will embrace his brokenness and his fear of everything around him.

 But he has to wait till that point, as homosexuality is of course all about sex and we cannot have that conversation to a 3 year old! I at least feel glad that when and if the time comes she will be there for him, that’s a big relief.

But while she kept telling me how inappropriate it was to talk about sex to her son till he can decide for himself, my mind got stuck on the phrase “wait till he understands”. When did I first understand that I like men, when I was five and at my cousin’s wedding I saw this 25 year old guy and I really wanted to talk to him? When I was eleven and my neighbour, who was twelve back then, came to me and asked me if I wanted to play a new game that he “invented” and then undressed me and kissed me and I did not know what it was but still loved it and wanted more? Or when blood rushed to my penis making it hard and weird when I heard my sister telling us how her handsome class mate looked in his shorts showing off his muscular-hairy legs? When did I first realize that I do not belong to the statistically significant 95% of the society? When I was told as a three year old that as the only Banerjee male kid I will one day marry a nice girl and will make my family proud by having male kids with her and I felt then and there I do not want to do that and at the same time felt wrong and guilty for already disappointing my whole family? When did I realize that I was wrong? When someone told me I should not like art as am a man and should only talk about sports and I knew I had no interest in that but still kept pretending that I liked it. Not entirely because I was scared to “come out” as that phrase had no meaning back then, but as I sincerely believed I was wrong.

I realize I have no specific date when I realized that I like men, but what I know is I always liked them, it was long before I became a sexual being, long before I started understanding words like heteronormative, gender identity and sexual fluidity. I know I cannot be critical to my family and friends as they had no clue about my sexuality until I told them, or maybe they did not want to know. But at least they have been loving and understanding enough to give me their warmth and support when I came out. But I think I can ask them for a favour, do not wait till your child is broken and is twenty something, till they attempt suicide several times, till they convince themselves that they are wrong and pretend straight, do not wait so long that they are too scared to fall in love. Just have a conversation, as for sure homosexuality is just not about having a sex talk with a three year old. 

Matsyanyaya

For a change today when I write, I do not write as a person of colour looking through his kaleidoscope in to a very white western world. Instead I look without any colour, being a species as complex and diverse as one can ever wildly imagine and simply name them Humans. My writing as usual is an outcome of my day to day interaction with people I have met in a continent which is predominantly white for last four years and through my conversation with my friends.

So the other day I was walking with my friend, a very white man. We both were making racist jokes, but what I suddenly realized was that he has to be much more careful about his choice of words even around his friend than I have ever been. That made me wonder how necessary is this political correctness in our everyday conversation? It is true in recent past parts of the white race have done terrible things to people of different colours, but expecting them to be apologetic all the moment of their existence seems too much to me, especially knowing they personally did not do anything to harm a race.  In fact, I even believe if the white race came together and tried to end the “atrocities” of the coloured races of present day as they tried to do in the past, the former group has a big chance of being at the receiving end considering the coloured people constitute the majority of this world. And on the other hand it is not that in the history of our species, the whites are the only one who have colonized, brutalized, vandalized and everything terrible to other races. It has happened again and again, whenever there was a disbalance of power in this world. The apparently more powerful has invaded the meek one again and again, and all our hands are stained in blood, some is fresh and some has faded away a long back. There is a wonderful word in Sanskrit to describe this animal instinct in us, Matsyanyaya, the instinct of the big fish to gulp down the small ones. And the Hindu tradition justifies the presence of laws and Government and even political correctness to prevent Matsyanyaya because this is not a very desirable situation and hence needs to be prevented from happening.   I do still understand that political correctness is important at spaces out of respect but I would rather make those internalized habits rather than things that you are just supposed to do to have a face in this apparently “liberal” society we live in.

With that key word, “liberal” I move to my next experience. Every time I had to come out in recent years, and if I were coming out to a hijab wearing dark skinned woman I always anticipated hostility whereas when I was doing the same to a brightly make up clad white woman I always thought it would be easier. Interestingly in my personal experience, all coloured people I came out to, they all surprised me by being extremely accepting and made me extremely uncomfortable by making me realize that I have a big bias against my on “sub-species” when it comes to taking them as open individuals. On the other hand I had at least two experiences where the “expected” open race reacted in a way that did not exactly express acceptance. So I wonder if we put too much pressure on these poor white folks by expecting them all to be liberal, accepting and inclusive in their thoughts. After all they all are a product of a damaged social system as we are at the other side of the “darker” world.

What I take away from the history that as a species we all have written is we all have done terrible thing, and we have never learned from it ever. May be it is our time to realize the meaning of the word “Matsyanyaya” from the depth of our hearts for a change and not blame each other for doing wrong. Rather accept that we all have done wrong and learn from it. This I believe will help us, who have been betrayed recently heal and take away the burden of mandatorily being “liberal” from another race. 

Yoga, ganja, meditation, samosas or more?

I have met couple of people who want to experience the “Indian lifestyle” if they could. I never thought about that statement very deeply ever. But then another friend of mine told me the iceberg analogy of culture very recently, and I started thinking about the “Indian lifestyle”. For people who are not familiar with this analogy it says just like the tip of the iceberg does not actually give an impression of the extent of the real thing, the exposed and ever changing “tip” of any culture is its clothes, food, music and art which assimilates from everything around. Now if I take away the food and the colourful clothes and the music and the great art of India away, I wonder if any of my foreign friends will have any clue what Indian culture is actually about! It is even hard for me to think what exactly this “Indian lifestyle” then will be. But for sure we do not wake up and take an elephant or camel ride to the bathroom where we shower with exotic spices and then wear gold threaded clothes and once again ride a very compassionate Royal Bengal Tiger and go to a yoga class and meditate the whole day only taking break to smoke ganja! On the other hand, I personally had no experience waking up in a slum with my twenty siblings and shitting in open air and then going out for begging the whole day at the traffic lights. So it comes down to the fact that I have no exotic lifestyle to share with anyone. My mornings used to be pretty much the same in Indian as it is here in North America, sans the heat and humidity. So now that I know my cultural heritage is not entirely the food that I eat, or the music that I listen to, the question becomes what the hell this cultural heritage is!!

To answer that I will go point by point and try to explain how through simple words and gestures I realized that I come from a different culture. The other day one of my good friends planned to come over around noon with her little kid to help me with cooking for a big event that evening. It was not until two hours before she was going to be there that I realised that I never told her to have lunch with me!! My cultural heritage just assumed that she knew that a lunch time meeting at someone’s place meant having food together! I did text her immediately but alas! It was already too late and she had her lunch. When I told her about my whole assumption she thanked me and told me she will never want to impose on me. And there we stood two cultures, both right at their own points, one very individualistic and the other very communal. And I realized its not the food that makes us different, but it’s the value around the food that makes a big difference.

Then the second is my extreme discomfort with the phrase “you are very kind” even for the slightest thing that I do for my friends, like thinking about them when they are sad or something. Though I can sense what do they mean by “kind” but to me kindness is something much more profound. Somehow the word kind to me personally brings the image of the soft gaze of Buddha the Avalokiteshwara.  To be kind I have to do something extreme, like give blood knowing may be my body will not be able to replenish it. This might be a too extreme example but kindness in my culture is something for which we sacrifice a big part of us.

Now that I have used the key word from an Indian cultural perspective, sacrifice, I should elaborate on that. The whole upbringing of an Individual in India they hear how important is it to live for all and not for your own self, life is about sharing, about giving and not expecting in return. It’s all about finding joy in discovering your own self in everyone and everything, to feel that we are at the core connected. And that is the Indian culture to me, to move from I to we, from my to our and from individual to collective. And in our practice in sharing food, making garments, celebrating festivals, getting married, mourning a loss and even fighting it is all about finding bliss in us.

i woke up this morning and knew there was something very familiar in the air! and now when i am starting to write this essay, i know what it was, it was the writing bug in me that took a long vacation and now is back! so here i am writing about things that does not matter to anyone perhaps but me. life outside this virtual world is lived and loved mostly for others so i will gratify myself here.
  i have started to write on queer issues lately, or queer things that excite me or frustrate me, i will continue on that path. i will narrate a story of moving, and a story of expectation and dreams and of disappointments. for people who already have read my blog before, know where i am from and etc, but i will just give a quick sum  up. i was born and raised in india in a fairly liberal city and family though i was never comfortable accepting my orientation. it was more because we lacked role models there than the fact that i feared my family will be hostile. it is just like the time when the aircraft was not invented but still the idea of flying enticed us. after a long period of self denial and trying to "fix" myself when i finally realized that am "irreversibly damaged" (read born gay), i looked into places where being gay was not that big a deal. as i was in academics the search was simple, start looking for positions to continue with education somewhere in europe or in the states. i started that effort since i was 22 just after finishing undergrad but it worked out when i finished my phd and was 29! by that time i had a pretty stable gay friend circle in my home town, a stable "relation" with the most desirable man in town and a self proclaimed slut. but still escaping the land where no one wants to stand up and be a gay role model was important and hence the long flight to durham north carolina! now people who are not as ignorant and completely imbecile like me would be already laughing their ass off with my selection of the place. but let me tell you my dear with a brown skin and origin in a "third world country" you just do not have much option when you are trying to escape. and then i had this great offer for research from my boss at Duke (as you can see i have capitalized the D of Duke whereas i did not do it for any other place or thing which would grammatically need that. it speaks of my love for that school). so there i was in a small town of southern united states. with students from all over the world, but still very white, southern and twink in appearance. and i have to admit here i always felt attracted to men younger to me, and hence felt certainly delighted to be there. but the shock hit me in couple of months when i realized that damn white kids do not like nearly dead (read 29) brown men!! and hence my constant effort to look good enough for them started. i ran 3 miles 4 days a week, lost 30lb and started looking pretty good actually (not exactly by my standard but a comment that i often received from my friends). but still things remained the same and i mostly remained single, although sex was plenty. so plenty that at times i feared i would definitely catch a bug! anyway the scene was not completely hopeless as i dated couple of guys, fell in love, acted as an ass hole with at least one and was dumped by others (though i still like to feel i dumped them) and most importantly i came out of my decaying closet. now this process needs some attention. once in durham i met a girl, also from my own home town in india, and started to hang out with her quite a bit. i still remember the first day i went to her and her girlfriend's house and saw a picture of two of them on the fireplace mantle, i was shocked!! and yes you have read it right, i was utterly uncomfortable with the picture, but in a positive way. it for the first time gave me a role model of a brown person being openly queer. and then the rest is history. i came out to my family and friends who still loved me and i was this skinny brown fabulous gay man in town. amidst all these changes one thing remained the same, most guys i liked did not like me, and there could be various reasons for that, like am not their type, am obnoxious, not attractive enough or may be THEY ALL ARE RACIST!! and i picked the last one up as that suited my fancy more than any. so i started my campaign against all racist white gay men, and as i could not find the actual people who were racist, may be, i started my campaign with my friends, couple of them were fellow white men. anyway i did not find it important to be visible in gay socializing spaces, though continued to be excessively present at gay hook up places and tried to solve racism by fucking every possible white man who would take it. trust me though pleasurable, it did no good to the racism thing, if it ever existed.
  by this time i had already spent two years in durham, with a pretty big and diverse friend circle and it was time to move on. and during my stay in durham and my constant complain about white gay men being racist a lot of my friends suggested me to move northward where people are happier, calmer and gay marriage is legal. and fortunately i got a great position and government grant in university of calgary! now what do you call this? a joke of the millennium? or the bearded man sitting up there playing with me? really?! calgary of all places in canada?! my god! why didn't anyone tell me that it is like the texas of canada! anyway i moved to calgary, with the hope to meet more accepting people (read good looking gay men) but bummer! calgary though bigger in every way is much, much, much (i can continue adding "much" till my end but rather stop here as you get my point) conservative than durham. the reason could be, after all durham is a university town (however they deny) and hence inherently liberal. anyway after i moved to calgary and withing one month the brutal winter started, i took to my old way of "curing racism" by fucking white men. but in this mad fucking rush one day i had my epiphany, the same bearded guy or my conscience told me, enough, if you want things to change for you and everyone who does not appear in a queer map go out and do something. this time i took the advice, started participating in events and making friends, yay! life is wonderful! no wait i was kidding am still single and hate it that people do not find me attractive. but what i have realized is, if my theory of racism is right, it is partly because we are not visible in gay spaces. and hence i will work my ass off (no sexual connotation but i must not say no to anyone who needs my company as a compassionate man of love) to change that. i am so motivated right now that i think i know why i always came to not very liberal places in north america. may be the divine plan is to make me work for the liberalism! am sure every liberal place of present started like calgary or durham or may be worse and people worked hard to change it. to make a community, to make it welcoming so that when someone from far comes to that place with hope they have their arm stretched out in love. where pride is just not a once a year thing where you dance, walk and get drunk and go home with a stranger you met in the parade. a place where the pride of being able to stand tall and out and be yourself is year long, irrespective of snow and rain and sun. and by doing so you fulfill your moral and ethical obligation to tell people deep in that dark closet that it is fine, we love you even if you want to stay in that closet. if you cannot come out of it, we will go in your closet, close the door and will tell you you are loved. so this i think will be my life now, with a lot of work, a lot of depression, a lot of trail to change and to be loved and of course a lot of hook ups. i embrace it all.

my fragmented thoughts this morning

since last couple of weeks i have been fighting my various "addictions" and "dark feelings" which include my addiction to hooking up and always feeling low and left out. i am not trying this because i have developed any judgment lately, i chose at least the hooking up as part of my life as i somehow wanted to see if monogamy is the answer to happiness. it is an extremely difficult experiment to start with, in a society where couple-hood and monogamy and perfect love is just not advised but worshiped, it is just impossible at times to understand the "observations" that my non-monogamous experiment gave me if those were for real or just a fabrication of "socio-normative"  thoughts ingrained in me. whatever be it for the time being i have realized that as it is impossible to think completely outside the norms, at least for the time being i need to experiment on monogamy and see how it feels. although i am afraid the "positive bias" in this experiment will be equally challenging. 

my life long spiritual and otherwise struggle has been to stop differentiating between the so called good and bad things in the society. i call it spiritual as this same journey takes me to a path were the sense of "self" absolves or in other words the self is reflected in all. once that happens the pain of having and not having theoretically vanishes as there is no difference between me and you. the same way the deep spirituality in me has always told me that there cannot be any bad in this creation. it is just a check and balance, if there is no black there is no white. so essentially calling an emotion or act as negative or dark always bothered me. but once again the socio-normativeness makes me fall in the trap of things which are supposed to be bright and acceptable. 

i was talking to my therapist last morning when she asked me how would my life feel without intellectualizing it. a simple question at the surface but the answer is pretty unconvincing. i just told her i do not know how to just feel without the thought of it being intellectual. is it a handicap that i am born with or it is there in others too? are there people who just feel without the need to make up or break logic?