The Bull and the Gazelle
Trauma is inevitable as death when the circumstances call for it.
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Eli Kimbell
This week’s post was inspired by the Studio Ghibli movie Howl’s Moving Castle, which, if you haven’t seen it (and I highly recommend it), follows the protagonist, Sophie, after a witch casts a spell on her that turns her into an old lady. The kicker is that she can’t tell anyone what happened to her.
The way Sophie is animated shifts throughout. Her appearance runs the gamut between how she looks at the outset as a young woman to how she looks when the spell is first cast upon her. At different intervals, her complexion mirrors the emotions she is feeling and varies rapidly in the way that emotions can, so that her face is a hodge-podge of herself, living her entire life in one moment or another. It’s just not always clear which emotions cause her complexion to shift.
I don’t think it’s any secret that our emotions can have physical manifestations. If I’m stressed, I tend to clench my jaw. If I’m anxious, I tend to pace. If I’m excited, I also tend to pace. For me, the revelation was not this causal relationship–it was the relationship between self-perception regarding our emotions and self-perception regarding our physical appearances. They are often intertwined, but this is not a relationship that always makes itself consciously known to us in the moment.
Feeling depressed can alter both our emotional and physical self-perceptions. In these times, my relationship with my emotions is obviously altered in a negative way. Negative self-talk becomes nearly unavoidable, but my relationship with my physical self can be variable. It can mirror the negative emotions I feel, but it can also fill the void by latching onto the image projected in the mirror and holding on for dear life. At least I’m still pretty, right?
Any powerful version of love can do away with all of it. I think we tend to lose our physical selves in these emotions, because the emotions are grand enough to carry all forms of self-perception to a window and toss them out like a yo-yo with a long string. When they fade, the yo-yo comes bounding back up. And if you possess the bravery to cut the string, all the power to you, as long as the yo-yo is still hanging out the window.
My point here is that the wind we give to our emotions can interact with the wind we give to our physical selves, but much of the time, it’s not clear how these two gusts interact with one another–and it’s okay that there is not always an answer.
I’m currently playing on a beer league softball team in Central Park. Until the first week of the season, I hadn’t set foot on anything akin to a baseball field since I pitched in the A10 conference playoffs in Davidson, North Carolina in early June of 2022. One thing hasn’t changed in that time, and it’s that I have the grace of a gazelle on a baseball field. Yes, let this washed up athlete pat himself on the back a little bit. Just this past weekend, a teammate told me I looked like a unicorn in the outfield. He got the hoofed creature wrong, but a compliment is a compliment.
Over the course of my playing career, I was able to develop a mechanism that alchemized confidence, simply by appearing confident. It was my physical self-perception, in this case, that was the catalyst for positive change in my emotional self-perception, and I could control it like the flip of a switch. As soon as I came off the field, it was back to neutral.
The danger here, both as an athlete and as a man, is that the ease of catalyzing this mechanism on the field and the sudden lack of outward emotion that occurred as a result could be a tool I used off the field to hide emotions that suffered from being masked. Alex has gone through different iterations of his ability to express over the course of his life, but I’ve always had a knack for masking my emotions, to the point of habit. Since my playing days have ceased, I’ve slowly chipped away at this mechanism and found great reward in unmasking, although I haven’t completely shed it.
Finding pride in my gazelle-like gait or in my game face can be valuable, but it can also be a survival tactic in times of woe. Although Alex has often been told that he appears intimidating without trying to be, or that he moves like a bull in a china shop, these mechanisms he’s developed in an effort to hide any form of weakness are altogether familiar. The arena of competition just looks a little different, and so do our physical manifestations of confidence. His posturing is a result of late 90s/early aughts-era depictions of street masculinity (think early Jay-Z), mine is a result of a lifetime of athletic competition (think Derek Jeter). A bull scrapes the ground and snorts, a gazelle squares up against a threat and postures accordingly, sometimes leading to a clash.
There is a line in the Hozier song “From Eden” that goes like this: You look familiar like my mirror years ago. To me, this is more of a reflection (pun intended) of emotional recognition rather than physical recognition, but to our human brains, it can sometimes be hard to tell where one face ends and the other begins. It can be easier to divide our many emotional selves into years or months or other periods of time and label them with a physical marker (long-haired Eli was an era, but decidedly an emotional one with a physical label). I can recognize a past self through simple self-reflection, but it is also possible to do this by seeing elements of a past self in another. I can see the foundation for Alex’s emotional masking and unmasking in his self-reflective writing, and it looks awfully familiar, like the identical twin of someone I once knew very well. Love can make a bull and a gazelle the same beast.
Alex DeOrio
Once upon a time, I was a good poker player. I was never particularly good at the game itself. I lacked mental stamina, but I made up for it in physical aura. My face was always a blank slate. Not so much a closed book as a brick wall reinforced with steel. Immune to manipulation. Impervious to tricks. It wasn’t a natural trait. It was a mechanism I developed over the years between the streets and the classroom. I’d cheated my way through high school by keeping a straight face while being openly cynical. Teachers knew I was gaming them but couldn’t get me to waver. I’d dodged jail by lying to cops. Never admitted to anything. They’d ask for ID. I’d tell them I left it at home; gave false names and phony addresses. I kept it real with myself, and was always solid with friends and acquaintances. But when it came to any higher authority, I was about as truthful as Pinocchio.
Through a forced wave of maturity, that all eventually changed. Over the years, the smirk began to fade into a mask of apprehension. Instead of overstepping with confidence, I second-guessed myself with constant hesitation. My heart became embedded on my sleeve. For most people, things like these would make them come off as sensitive and fragile. The problem with that is that I wasn’t most people.
I was…well, I was Babyface. Stocky. Brolic. Animated. Loud. Intimidating to a fault. There was a cockiness about me that came off as dangerous. In a normal setting, exposing your inner emotions might make you come off as vulnerable. A cry baby, if you will. In my case, it made me come off like a pitbull prone to aggression. Unpredictable and easily set off. I’d misinterpret passing remarks and direct insults. If someone would mock my appearance or imitate the way I talk, or in some cases, even just hit me with a generic insult, I wouldn’t laugh it off or try to come up with a witty comeback. Instead I’d go straight for the jugular with a random disconnected rant consisting of insults to your wife, shockingly ruthless remarks about your kids, along with references to disabilities or diseases that were so callous and brutal that in some cases they were hard to even take seriously, yet in other cases would shock people to the core and cause them to cut off contact with me. The fact that I’d usually end these rants with the phrase “Your mother should’ve swallowed you” made it relatively easy to erase me from one's life. You could say I was spewing out venom. But it was more like I was spitting out acid. The mere thought that somebody might try to disrespect me in even the mildest sense would make me turn bitter. I’d become something I wasn’t. I’d turn cruel. Like a rattlesnake when it feels threatened. Sheer fury. No mercy. It wasn’t normal. It wasn’t cool or macho. It was dark and disturbing. I wasn’t an “asshole” or a “dick.” I was just a straight savage. Hence the nickname “Babyface,” for I bore a striking resemblance to the murderous Great Depression-era bank robber Baby Face Nelson, both physically and behaviorally.
Yet beneath it all, there wasn’t a single bad bone in my body. With my whole life ahead of me, just one chess move away from overriding adversity, I was still just a confused, misguided child who couldn’t quite pinpoint his identity and had absolutely zero control over his emotions. That’s the harsh truth. Throughout my journey and quest for success, the darkest moments of my life have always taken place inside my head. As even the most passive introvert will tell you, reality is a cakewalk compared to battling internal demons.
It wasn’t until I got shot that I came to this realization. The way I minimized everything. A maniac shot me in the temple, execution-style. You’d think I’d become an agoraphobe, terrified of my own shadow. There’d be no shame in that. Trauma is inevitable as death when the circumstances call for it. But instead, the only thing I was concerned about, the only single thing I was afraid of, was people thinking I was afraid. I was hellbent on emphasizing the fact that I was not an innocent victim, that my hands weren’t clean, that I wasn’t some poor man who got taken advantage of. I needed the world to know that I was a soldier who’d come back swinging. I even made it a point to refuse to talk to the detectives. Here these cops were showing me a surveillance video of the guy pulling out the revolver and shooting me while I was sitting in my driver's seat. And I wouldn’t even admit I was there. I just sat there, still as stone, protecting the code of the street, the code that nearly got me killed. Piece of shit lured me into a trap and tried to blow my head off. And all I was concerned about was making sure I wasn’t a rat. It was a bizarre, illogical act of defiance you had to witness with your own eyes to believe.
That was six months ago. Since then, I’ve taken the time to evaluate every fiber in my body. At the risk of sounding cliche, I’ve come to the most obvious of conclusions: life is precious. Our time is limited. There’s nothing shameful about appearing vulnerable. Having a good heart is not a sign of weakness, but a sign of strength. I’ve learned to compartmentalize my feelings and emotions. It’s like my father always said: “The only thing you’re guilty of is being human.” If that’s all there is to it, then that’s good enough for me.
Sounds nice, right? A happy ending. It all makes sense now! Just keep a positive attitude, like those overnight life-coaches on YouTube keep preaching. Simple-minded yes-men who couldn't even fathom what it’s like to live in a world of darkness, yet will take your money with enthusiasm in exchange for insight you already have. Say what you will about the life I chose. But at least I always made sure my customers got what they paid for.
The hard, if not basic, truth is that you can only rewire your brain so much. It’s what you learn from self-awareness that causes you to grow. Hiding your emotions is just another way of saying you’re a ticking time-bomb. Controlling them and recognizing them - that’s where strength lies.