I am, unfortunately, obsessed with feelings.

I would rather feel a feeling deeply than do almost anything else in life.

When I manage to get inside of a feeling, I generally prefer to live there. And when it’s a deep or unique or gripping feeling, usually the jaws of life (read: my poor, sweet, much more logical husband) can’t even manage to pull me out.

Now, the thing to distinguish here is that I’m not, nor have I ever been, the type of person who is in love with being in love. No. Love is a specific type of feeling and yes, I love all feelings but being in love is a more culturally-specific, loaded feeling that I don’t necessarily need to enjoy all of the rest of them.

I do love, well, love. But it could be any love. It could be the love I feel for my husband, my parents, my sister’s dog, my fellow human on the subway, the clerk at the grocery store, my best friend, my ex-best friend. It’s all the same to me. In fact, the love for my fellow human on the subway, the clerk at the grocery store, and my ex-best friend might even be more meaningful to me (if such a thing is possible to a person obsessed with feelings) because, well, it’s weird. There’s more to excavate when the feelings are weird.

And I’m nothing, dear reader, if not an excavator of the human experience.

Give me a feeling and I will dredge and claw and scoop that thing until I’ve extracted as much meaning as humanly possible. And I will enjoy every damn minute of it.

I’m a collector of feelings.

A connoisseur, if you will.

Possibly an addict.

And of course, I love the contradictory ones. The embarrassing ones. The inconvenient ones. The ones that shouldn’t coexist but somehow do.

Like, loving someone you’re furious with. Grieving something you’re glad ended. Feeling freedom and loneliness simultaneously. Feeling gratitude and despair in the same afternoon.

These are my favorite emotional habitats. Like a tiny emotional raccoon digging through the trash for one more complicated feeling to survive the night.

Picture it: you just had to do something very uncharacteristically you, like quit a job with no notice because of some life circumstances, and now you’re not only dealing with the life circumstance, you’re also dealing with what it all means that you quit like this. Who are you now? Are you a quitter? How do you feel? Are we anxious? Are we upset? Are we confused? Are we frightened about what’s to come?

Now picture this: you’re perimenopausal. Everything makes you cry. You can’t talk about the nice lady at Starbucks who gave you a free vegan cake pop without welling up. You’re driving your husband nuts but he’s also so sweet so he’s researching natural remedies that can help the waves. Meanwhile, you’re drinking too much coffee to get through your days and constantly talking his ear off about the same five topics day in and day out. Is he the best man ever? How much love can we possibly feel? How can we be so enthusiastic and so depressed at the same time? Can we just feel grateful and move on without more tears?

What about this: you’ve ended your relationship with your best friend of many years, because, well, you had to. But every single feeling is alive. Are you happy it’s over? Are you sad without him? Are you terrified you made the wrong decision? Are you angry he didn’t fight for you? Are you overwhelmed by the rage?

Well, dear reader, if you’re me: you are positively eating up every single one of these circumstances. Life sucks, sure, but who cares when there are so many feelings to feel and talk about and think about and discover and live in?!

Ok, I admit it: I might be a gremlin.

My husband: “I hate feeling anxious.”

Me::stroking fake beard::: “Interesting. Let’s pull up a chair and see what this anxiety has to say.”

My colleague: “I wish I didn’t care so much.”

Me::shakes excitedly::: “But then you’d miss all the GOOD STUFF.”

My friends: “I need closure.”

Me::leans in way too close::: “But have we fully explored the emotional nuances of this situation?”

Being the type of person that simply experiences emotions would be lovely at this point.

Not me though. I have to dissect them. Interview them. Strap them in a chair and waterboard them until they have no more left to give.

I love to ask: What are you? Why are you here? What do you mean? What are you trying to teach me? Also, what do you mean?!

And I think that last one is why I really don’t mind being who I am. Dare I say, I love being who I am.

Because, what, in fact, provides the backdrop against which we create meaning in life?

I’ll give you a hint: it rhymes with schmeelings.

Feelings are the way we internalize and derive meaning from each and every life experience. And feelings, as we’ve been learning as a society the past several years, don’t just exist statically in the brain. They are very much alive in the body.

Feelings are, in fact, how life enters our being. They are how we know we’re alive.

To me, feelings are sacred.

The emotional cost of that, though, is that nothing gets to be small. Nothing passes through without leaving a mark. The nice lady at Starbucks and the ex-best friend and the grief and the gratitude all arrive at the same volume.

I’m mostly exhausted by own inner life at all times.

I also wouldn’t trade it for anything.

And sometimes, both of those things are true in the same afternoon.

Which is, of course, just another feeling to excavate.

Unfortunately…(?)