I've never found the right words

Sagittarius horoscope for the week of April 11^th:  

"It’s so hard to forget pain, but it’s even harder to remember sweetness," writes novelist Chuck Palahniuk. "We have no scar to show for happiness. We learn so little from peace." Your assignment in the coming days, Sagittarius, is to prove Palahniuk wrong. As the surges of sweetness flow through you, as your secret joy ripens into bright blooming bliss, imprint the sensations on your memory. Vow to remember them for the rest of your life. Make these breakthrough moments into talismans that will serve as magical spells whenever you need rejuvenation in the future. (http://www.freewillastrology.com )

I’m pretty excited because I get to go to an emotional intelligence conference and certification this month. The goal is to learn how to integrate emotional intelligence into curriculum in order to teach kids how to recognize, explore, and handle their feelings.

"I don't want to be at the mercy of my emotions. I want to use them, to enjoy them, and to dominate them." –Oscar Wilde

Emotional intelligence represents an ability to validly reason with emotions and to use emotions to enhance thought.

Emotional intelligence refers to an ability to recognize the meanings of emotion and their relationships, and to reason and problem-solve on the basis of them. Emotional intelligence is involved in the capacity to perceive emotions, assimilate emotion-related feelings, understand the information of those emotions, and manage them.

Many adults also feel uncomfortable or out-of-touch with their emotions. We aren’t explicitly taught coping mechanisms for the way we are feeling, who to talk to, and what feelings mean. Many times our anxiety related to emotions manifests itself into problems that affect our thoughts, activities, and actions on a daily basis; especially if these emotions are suppressed. 

"I feel too much. That's what's going on.' 'Do you think one can feel too much? Or just feel in the wrong ways?' 'My insides don't match up with my outsides.' 'Do anyone's insides and outsides match up?' 'I don't know. I'm only me.' 'Maybe that's what a person's personality is: the difference between the inside and outside.' 'But it's worse for me.' 'I wonder if everyone thinks it's worse for him.' 'Probably. But it really is worse for me." –Jonathan Safran Foer

Window Eating- The act of standing in front of a refrigerator with the door open for an over-excessive amount of time and then closing the door without taking anything. Usually done by picky eaters or one who is bored out of his/her mind. (www.urbandictionary.com )

Window eating makes me anxious.

I have always been an overly emotional person. At times this has been one of my greatest weaknesses, but also one of my greatest strengths.

"If you hold back on the emotions--if you don't allow yourself to go all the way through them--you can never get to being detached, you're too busy being afraid. You're afraid of the pain, you're afraid of the grief. You're afraid of the vulnerability that loving entails. But by throwing yourself into these emotions, by allowing yourself to dive in, all the way, over your heard even, you experience them fully and completely." –Mitch Albom

And at times, maybe I dove in too deep.

"I love people. Everybody. I love them, I think, as a stamp collector loves his collection. Every story, every incident, every bit of conversation is raw material for me. My love's not impersonal yet not wholly subjective either. I would like to be everyone, a cripple, a dying man, a whore, and then come back to write about my thoughts, my emotions, as that person. But I am not omniscient. I have to live my life, and it is the only one I'll ever have. And you cannot regard your own life with objective curiosity all the time..." –Sylvia Plath

I have always been a person who has struggled with managing my anxiety. I have significantly improved as I have gotten older; but, I have always been one to worry about things that I cannot control. In college I was so out of touch with how to deal with my anxiety that I literally holed up, quit my job, stopped going to class, and experienced a prolonged panic-attack of sorts. 

"The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown" –H.P. Lovecraft

Looking back if I had been more in touch with these feelings, I would have handled life a lot better. I must say, I believe I was very similar in high school; but, it’s much easier to hole up and sleep all the time when parents are providing all the food and shelter. 

"Music touches us emotionally, where words alone can't." –Johnny Depp

"Emotions, in my experience, aren't covered by single words. I don't believe in "sadness," "joy," or "regret." Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that it oversimplifies feeling. I'd like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions, Germanic train-car constructions like, say, "the happiness that attends disaster." Or: "the disappointment of sleeping with one's fantasy." I'd like to show how "intimations of mortality brought on by aging family members" connects with "the hatred of mirrors that begins in middle age." I'd like to have a word for "the sadness inspired by failing restaurants" as well as for "the excitement of getting a room with a minibar." I've never had the right words to describe my life, and now that I've entered my story, I need them more than ever. "
-Jeffrey Eugenides 

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