40 Reasons Why - Reason #6: Normative Male Alexithymia

Like most families, whenever the Feliciano Clan gets together there's usually a period of telling the same favorite stories from childhood over and over again.  If you listen closely, and especially if you listen closely with my ears, you'll notice that pretty much every story that features me ends with: "...and then Joaquin started crying!"  Cue the laughter.

Growing up, I was the emotional kid and a bigtime crier.  Sad crying, happy crying, angry crying, getting-beaned-by-a-pitch crying, and everyone's favorite: I-have-no-F-ing-idea-why crying. You name it and I was probably crying about it  And whether it was through being made fun of or, even better, being punished, for doing it, I learned very early on that crying and other displays of really strong emotion were Not Quite The Thing.  So like pretty much every other Young American Male, I learned it was really important to take it like a man and quit crying like a little girl.  Or you'd just be making things worse for yourself

That phenomenon is so prevalent in the US that there's even a fancy name for it: Normative Male Alexithymia.  GENIUS ALERT: When I laid this term on my wife, without missing a beat she no shit, said: "Alexithymia. Hmmm...'a' means without; 'lexi' means 'words;' and ' thymia' means 'feelings.'  So alexithymia must be an inability to express emotion." Gotta love that woman!  So yeah, NMA is the learned condition of being unable to recognize or describe one's feelings.  And if you're a dude who grew up in the US you'ev almost definitely got it, too.  But it's not totally our fault.  By not being expected or allowed to show strong emotion, most dudes in the US just don't ever learn how.  Actually, that's not totally true.  The Man does give us two emotions that we're allowed to express: anger and violence.  But I don't even think that second one is an emotion.

So like most guys in the US, I grew up ashamed and embarassed at having this super emotional side of me that I had to keep hidden and that had a habit of popping out - as anger and violence - at the least convenient times.  But as I got older I started recognizing that this lack of emotion was seriously getting in the way of my own personal life and my life with Anno.  But despite recognizing that there was a problem, I felt like I had no idea how to  make things better.
  
Fast forward to 2002, when I started road cycling.  Two significant things, relative to this whole emotion thing, occurred in that first year:  My father died and I did my first multi-day HIV/AIDS ride.  When my dad died, I was initially horrified about how unfeeling I felt about the whole thing outside of the officially sanctioned times when it's ok for men to cry (e.g. upon first hearing the news; at 2am in the first week after death; during the eulogy if you're delivering it; in Top Gun during the scene when Maverick is in the ocean cradling Goose's dead body).  However, a strange thing happened when I started getting abck onto my bike after the funeral.  During almost every ride the summer after he died, all I would have to do was think of him and, BAM!, I'd be bawling, sometimes so bad that I'd have to pull over because I couldn't see through the tears.  Yeah, pretty wild and disconcerting.  But just at first.  After awhile I kind of got into it and started riding a lot just to get back to that place where all I could do was get slammed by a big wall of feeling.  'Cuz I felt a lot better afterwards.  It felt like the only way I could access all of that grieving stuff was from the seat of my bicycle.  It had something to do with the solitude, the easy repetitive motion of turning over the pedals, and, mostly, getting myself so exhausted that I wasn't able to keep that little emotional critter inside of me so tightly packaged away. 

The next year I rode the AIDS/LifeCycle from SF to LA and that was when things kicked into emotional overdrive.  That was a trip, literally. Seven days of riding my brains out to exhaustion while being surrounded by gobs and gobs of on-your-jersey-sleeve searing personal tragedy and triumph and everything in between.  And, gods help me, it felt awesome!  Just realizing that, no, I was not in fact incapable of experiencing or showing emotion, I was just seriously out of practice.  And that I had discovered this activity and this community where it was not only okay to show emotion, it was literally impossible not to.

Now that I'm looking at turning 40, the situation is: Yes, I am getting better at accessing and living with and celebrating this emotional side of myself.  But, damnit, do I really need to ride my bike so far, so hard, and so long just to get there?  Wouldn't it be nice if Stoic and Rational Joaquin were able to just chill with Emotional Joaquin without needing a few hours in the Pain Cave beforehand?

Through taking on this $40G project, my hope, which happily is turning out to be true, is that this year long fundraising effort will be filled with tons and tons of opportunities to spend some time in almost every seat of the Emotional Rollercoaster that's just plain old being a mature, caring, and loving human being.  And challenge myself to stay connected through the whole thing and celebrate feeling good as well as feeling shitty about how things are going without worrying too much about how I feel about how I'm feeling or how it looks or sounds or reads to others.