Emotional Intoxication: What Happens When the Drawbridge Comes Down
On Technicolor, the tower with the moat and what it feels like to be alive in that way again after nearly a decade.
Emotional Intoxication
I found an article.
Not looking for it.
Just there it was.
I started reading.
And something happened that I don’t have a clean word for yet.
The closest I’ve come is this:
Emotional intoxication.
That’s what the first few days felt like.
Blown over.
My mind triggered like a squirrel's, checking every stone, every leaf in the garden, going everywhere at once, unable to settle.
In the best possible way.
The Tower
Here’s something I haven’t written about directly yet.
Over the years, through everything, I built something around my heart.
Not metaphorically small.
A granite tower.
Full height.
Complete with a moat.
Crocodiles in the moat.
I built it deliberately, incrementally, one stone at a time.
Because the alternative, leaving the heart exposed to what was happening outside it, was not survivable.
So I built the tower.
I got very good at living in it.
I learned to be present, warm, connected, and even generous, all from inside the tower, without ever actually opening the gate.
The castle and the moat stayed intact.
The heart stayed in the back room.
Safe. Managed. Unexposed.
And then.
Without a single conscious decision, without a plan or a strategy or a risk assessment, the drawbridge came down.
And I went running across it.
The Head vs. The Heart
My entire life has been head-dominant.
The head is the one in charge.
The little scientist is sitting in a chair with controls, orchestrating all the human moves, like something out of a movie.
Running the patterns.
Recognizing the signals.
Keeping everything categorized and filed and manageable.
Whereas the heart has always played second fiddle.
Not because I don’t have one.
Because leading with it never felt safe.
So here’s what was different this time.
This wasn’t the head.
The head wasn’t consulted.
The head didn’t run its pattern recognition.
The head didn’t file anything or assess anything or weigh the variables.
This was something else entirely, something that arrived already decided, already certain, already in motion before I knew I was moving.
Heart dominant.
For possibly the first time in my adult life.
And I have no language for it yet.
Not complete language.
Which tells me everything I need to know about where it lives.
Technicolor
The best way I can describe the last few weeks is this.
You know the moment in The Wizard of Oz, the shift from black and white to color?
Dorothy stepping in the ruby slippers, catching the light for the first time?
That.
That’s the closest visual I have.
Everything that was flat and muted and gray in life, not dramatically, not all at once, but gradually, over years of just getting through suddenly had color in it again.
Not just warmth.
Technicolor.
The contrast was overwhelming.
Is overwhelming.
Because here’s the honest part:
I got overexcited. I became too much.
I didn’t realize in the moment because I was just behind my own excitement, running ahead of myself, not fully accounting for the fact that this level of aliveness is something I haven’t felt in close to a decade.
Maybe longer.
The nervous system that had been calibrated for survival,
for gray,
for managed,
for safe,
suddenly had to handle something it hadn’t processed in years.
My nervous system didn’t really know what to do with it.
Neither did I.
What It Means to Receive
Here’s the question underneath all of it.
After everything, the tower, the moat, the years of closed loop, the isolation, the car, and the long winter, what does it mean to simply be open to receive?
Not strategically open.
Not carefully open with terms and conditions.
Just open.
Drawbridge down.
Running across without thinking.
I’ve been sitting with that question.
And what I keep coming back to is this:
I didn’t decide to be open.
I just was.
Which means the tower, for all its granite and crocodiles and carefully maintained walls, never actually got to the heart.
It protected it.
It didn’t bury it.
The heart was in there the whole time.
Waiting.
Not dormant.
Just waiting for the right signal.
And when the signal came, it didn’t ask the head for permission.
It just recognized something.
Instant knowing.
Instant impulse.
In all the “-ology” kind of ways.
The New Jacket
Something is telling me I need to try something on.
A “heart-first” existence.
Like a new jacket or a new pair of boots that needs breaking in.
Worn differently than anything I’ve worn before.
It might be uncomfortable at first.
It might require adjustment.
It will almost certainly require me to slow down, recalibrate, and stop running so far ahead of myself.
But.
If it fits, if this is what it feels like to lead from the heart instead of always from the head, it might be the most comfortable I’ve ever been in my entire life.
And what a thing that would be.
After everything.
To arrive here.
Barely. But here.
And, for the first time in a long time, alive in this moment in Technicolor.
More soon.
Thanks for being here.
Be well.
Bert.