On emotional excitability, or lack thereof

Yesterday I took some time to evaluate myself and see how I was doing, a practice I enjoy taking part in every so often.  In doing so, I decided to read a couple journal entries from during and before my LDS mission.  What surprised me is how different it sounded, how not-like-me it sounded.  I'm well aware that I changed a lot during my mission, and I feel that I've changed at least as much since the completion of my mission.  But one defining characteristic of the changes I've been through has been a gradual decline of my emotional excitability throughout my life.  With the possible exception of the last few months, this has largely been unintentional and has gone mostly undetected.  I don't necessarily consider this a loss, but yesterday I was wondering why much of my emotional excitability has faded.  This post is somewhat of an attempt for me to gather my thoughts about it.  The easiest way is for me to approach it autobiographically.

I remember little about what it was like to be a child, and I feel most people my age will relate.  But from my parents' description of my personality, I was very expressive about almost everything that happened to me.  It was very easy for someone to tell how I was feeling at any given time.  I was also quite extroverted and had very little inhibition about sharing my opinions or thoughts about something.  I think this is pretty common among children today.

This trend continued throughout most of junior high school.  I was more withdrawn in the occasional environment where I felt less comfortable (physical education, for example), but for the most part, especially around those I knew well, I continued to be expressive and outspoken, with little care for what other people thought about me.

Sophomore year of high school was different for me.  I had gone to a junior high school that most people in my area didn't, so when I returned to the high school that most of my childhood friends were going to, I knew a lot less people.  My default became introversion, a habit I broke out of only when I was around people I knew well.  Around this time I began to notice that most other people's ups and downs seemed more intense than my own.  I concluded that it was because I had never really been through anything difficult; and because I had never known the sorrow of hardship, I didn't really know how to appreciate the joy of wellness.

This conclusion lead to some interesting behavior on my part.  I often wondered why my life was so easy (I still do sometimes).  Being a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, I had often been taught that if we had not had extremely trying experiences up to that point in our lives, we would someday.  I began wondering when all my trials were going to come, and if God was just "saving them up" to unload a barrel of crises on me when he saw fit.  I would occasionally pray for trials, just because I knew they would come sometime so it might as well be now.

After a couple years of nothing hard really happening, I decided that one of two things must be the case:  either I was so spiritually strong that nothing that happened to me seemed like a trial, or I was so spiritually weak that God was just babysitting me through life until I was able to handle something remotely hard (I didn't realize at the time that reality was probably somewhere between those two extremes).  I also wondered where my motivation to do good was going to come from, since I never had to apply self-discipline or a work ethic to overcome any obstacles.

My first year of college brought a lot of changes.  Like most people, I knew hardly anyone in the singles ward I attended at BYU.  Most of my first semester free time was spent either associating with a few close friends or doing things by myself.  After a few months of this, I realized I was missing something.  Second semester I tried to get a lot more involved, and it worked.  Our ward did a mini-version of the Lion King for a stake activity we had, and I played Pumbaa.  It was the corniest thing in the world, but for some reason I still don't understand it was one of the best experiences I had in my life.  I made some really close friends that semester, and I was happier than I had been before.  As a bonus, anytime I listened to music from the Lion King, it brought back all the memories and feelings from that time in my life.

One of the first things that I learned about my mission was that I would experience greater happiness and joy than I had ever experienced before (Preach my Gospel, page v).  Knowing how amazing college was for me, I looked forward to when that was going to happen.  Sometimes I had great experiences that seemed like they "qualified" for my happiest experience ever, but after thinking about it for a while I decided that college was still better.  I started to doubt somewhat if anything that great would ever happen.  An experience I had about halfway through my mission crushed all doubt whatsoever (the last one described in the linked post).  I may only be able to say that I had one experience that "topped" all the happiness that I had ever felt before, but I unquestionably did, and I can't deny that.

I mentioned that I've changed a lot since the end of my mission.  Part of that was when I spent a summer in Oklahoma selling pest control, but that doesn't have much influence on what I'm discussing here.  The main thing that's changed in the last few months has been how much I've pursued intelligence to the exclusion of several other things in my life.  I've recently been exposed to several works of fiction that quite realistically depict the protagonist being able to do things that other people can't, largely because they can keep their emotions in check and use their intellect to solve problems.  It's fiction.  I know that.  But I can't help it affecting the way I think.  I know a lot of difficult decisions are coming up for me, both planned and unplanned, and my current opinion is that I'll deal with them a lot better by using my head and not letting emotions cloud my judgment.  I don't know if that's the best way to go about doing things.  But I don't plan on changing unless I feel that regaining my emotional excitability (or extraversion for that matter) is something I should do.  Right now, being "left-brained" feels like part of who I am.  I guess it's only a matter of time before I figure out whether it's worth the cost.