For as long as I've possessed sentient thought, I have been aware of my oddity. It doesn't even come close to being remotely bothersome that I do not experience life the same way most people do, or that I do a lot more labor in my interactions with people. That is not to say that I work really hard in conversation, but it loosely interprets to me working on myself to reduce the harm I can cause, and that showing up in my interactions with others.

I recently learned that this makes me a relatively boring person to most.

Societally, the metric for interest is in my favor. I am amusing, I hold great conversations, I approach life with curiosity and not knowing, most of the time. I show up authentically, and I am empathetic and —almost— cripplingly passionate. I was once told by a friend that I was strange, and I liked it. It was a nice thing for my peculiarity to make me distinct, however sure I was that most people would find it uncomfortable.

Emotionally though, I believe I am an entirely new experience for most people to take on. I do not shame in the intensity with which emotion spills out of me. I feel everything, and I feel it hard. I experience all of the emotions in a dizzying experience that can only be described as a Tsunami. Anger takes my reasoning. Sadness takes away my mobility. Joy saturates life and color to an almost impossible degree. Disgust leaves a taste in my mouth that brushing my tongue does not take away. However, asking a nice bevy of people, I have no reactions.

You see, the expression of emotion is something I have studied for a nice percentage of my life. I have watched rage engulf a person and cause venom to spew from their lips, watched it morph a short man into a violent boxer, lend him the strength of someone thrice his size — even when it was unnecessary. I have watched rage turn to violence, and I do not wish to emulate it. I find it innately ugly, and inhuman, and so, I pause. This is where the strangeness comes in; when I feel the violence of anger entering my fingertips or beginning to enter my speech, I turn away. I shake and vibrate, and I beat the air. Pillows. Assault paper with words I can never speak aloud for all of their ugliness, and burn it.

For as long as I have been aware of the impact I have on the ones I love, I have not reacted in explosive ways. I do not let the discomfort of my emotions, the intensity of my mental and emotional experience overwhelm me to the point where I foist that intensity on anyone else, burden them with my emotional experience in all of its unpleasantness.

This lack of an explosion, this quiet spilling, is why people assume that I lack passion. You see, more common is the explosion of expression, the lack of control, and I guess however bare, my control over my reactions appears too strong. Uncontrolled displays of emotion, like yelling, threats, leveraging information and blackmail, the weaving of strings, passive aggression, control, etc. all make me uncomfortable, so I just… don't.

See, they impact the recipient in different ways. Sure, some claim they find it exciting, but more often than not, I find that it invites fear. It incites sadness. On occasion, anger. Invites unease. Not to invalidate that these emotions may have occurred regardless of how the message was conveyed, but there is something to be said about gently delivering emotional experiences that feels safer, to me. Instead of allowing you to be swept up by the Tsunami, I mitigate it, offer you a ripple instead. Instead of offering you a body of water to drown in, I adjust it, fill it, and give you a puddle to splash in instead. Tsunami, meet Ripple. Drowning, meet Splash.

I have worked hard and invited practice, even, to ensure that I do not lose this control over myself, even when I am floating dangerously close to the precipice. I know every crack in my person; have them memorized. I know my anger is the ugliest of all my emotions because of the destruction I have caused in the past with it. I have altered lives permanently with my anger, if you would believe it. I do not wish to be that, not anymore. I do not wish to morph into that vindictive, unkind, wild dog ever again. I know my sadness and the way I share it, like I am handing out bags of sweets, the way I allow it to rot inside me, rot me, allow it fester and cause negativity to escape me, allow it work inside me and use my tongue to multiply, spew causticity. I could go on and on.

I know these things. I know them, because I swim in them, remember? Ripples are nowhere near comparable in intensity to the waves of a Tsunami. I know what it is to drown in the intensity of my emotions, and I think I would take being called boring over sharing that and watching people flail in waters that even I can

barely navigate.