Emotion

The worst part is not being able to remember. It's not knowing how it felt, or the sensations of the occurrence. What's worst isn't the experience, but not even being able to recall enough of the emotional aspects of it to either learn from it or even integrate it into an understanding of life in any way.

Repression is annoying. On the one hand, it's convenient and allows painful memories to be erased. But on the other, it stops the mind from accessing those memories when someone's ready to deal with them again. It stops any emotion, feeling, sensation, recollection, anything that could potentially lead to some form of closure.

It still hurts because it's like a lesson not learned. The knowledge of the experience is still there, but the ability to deal with it isn't. There is no sensation to go off of, no emotions, no relevant meaning...it's blank. That makes it virtually impossible to associate with other aspects of life, other experiences.

If something about it had stuck in mind...fear, pain, anger, just about any emotion, it would be easier to work with. But nothing did. It's one blank slate. The knowledge of it is there, but it's almost like a movie, a thing so separate that one doesn't even feel anything. Standard memory doesn't cover this sort of occurrence because repression stepped in and cut out the most essential parts.

All that remains is an empty shell. Because those traces of emotion were lost and abandoned, a solid path can't be constructed from the past to the present. And without that path, how can the present state be understood? It can be observed, labeled, and categorized...but it can't be accepted, integrated, or truly realized.

Is any experience worth it if the associated emotions are not retained? Can it really be of any value to an individual, then? Or does it in that way cause even more harm? If the emotions were there, they could at least be analyzed, assessed, dealt with...but as it stands, the entirety of the situation is blank...leaving in addition to a set of missing feelings an entirely separate set of confusion and conflict, misery and despair at the hopeless prospect of ever being able to understand it.

Maybe in that way, the experience is more of a test than it would have been had emotions been retained in memory. Perhaps this emptiness is more of a challenge to come to terms with. But is it really possible for human nature to simply accept an unknown without coming up with theories that could never be tested? For that is so unlike the human mind, so lacking in the thirst for knowledge and quest for greatness that leads people to become who they are.

The question is one not of overcoming, but one of accepting. What happened in the past is not, per se, a barrier in the present, but is rather an influence on it, of which the effects are not entirely understood, if at all. So what happens next? How is it best to proceed so that any sort of comprehension may now take place? That is the question.