That feeling you get when you're living...

I was catching up on emails tonight, and I was able to write back a professor from my undergrad days. He was the chair of the Communication Studies department, and is now retired to a cool place in the South. Him and I still have kept in touch after college. Every time I do one of my mass updates, I can guarantee on him writing back to say hello.
In writing him, I was taken back to college memories, my last semester in undergrad, to be exact. I was in his Interpersonal Communication (AKA the crying class), and for the most part, kinda cared and didn't care. I had mass senioritis, and mass fantasies of New York (which will be another entry at some point in the near future). But this professor always had a way at reaching me, especially when I didn't want to be reached.
One of the classes found an unsuspecting soul sitting in a chair in the middle of the room, looking at each of her/his peers. The person in the middle would then look at every person in the room as they made a statement about them, either in praise or in criticism: it didn't matter what was said, just as long as it was the truth. The receiver could do nothing but say thanks and move on to the next person.
Because of how long this exercise can take, not everyone was able to do it. But that wasn't in the cards for me.
Everyone was very kind in their words, and I knew they were sincere, for which I was--and still am--very grateful. At the end, it was the professor's turn. He had piercing blue eyes, and they were the eyes of a sage, someone who KNEW and someone who felt compelled to speak the truth. He looked at me and said, "Mike, you use anger and cynicism to hide your true feelings. You are afraid to feel."
My first instinct was to get pissed off, but luckily, I just sat there for a second.
It would take a while, long after I graduated, for me to realize the gravity of that moment. For the first time, truly possibly in my life, someone figured me out.
As I told my friend Laura, I believe every day is a life-changing experience, but there are those moments in time which ALTER you, rip off your skin, open up your rib cage and expose your heart and soul to the air of being. My time in Oxford, accepting the Texas job over the phone on a rainy December night and this moment changed me.
Those that know my personal upbringing know that I have a lot to be angry about. I had a problem controlling my temper when I was younger and would eventually learn to use humor and an easy nature to subside that rage within me. In many ways, it's still there: that primal, gut urge that all is screwed up, and there ain't a damn thing I can do about it.
But I learned from another professor that anger is a secondary emotion, that anger stems from and is fueled by deep pain and sorrow. And if you can't cry about it, you'll get angry about it.
I was told that when I got older, I would learn to control myself and the anger and pain would eventually go away, to forever lay in that state of numbness. I think most men are told that. Anger is tough for men, I think. It is drilled into us that anger should be the first response to pain, even feeling in general. Girls cry, men get angry.
What a crock of shit.
It's tough to be a human being today. I think everyone, both male and female, will agree on that assessment. In my opinion, women deal with stuff better than men. In the end, men don't deal because somewhere down the line, we forgot how to feel, and if we do feel, it's so private and so sequestered, it's almost suffocating.
I do realize that I express myself a little stronger than others. I'm OK with that, I put myself out there, so I accept the reactions and consequences that comes with that. But what I don't accept is those thoughts that creep up on me not to feel, not to express pain, not to feel lonely, or feel sad, or feel jubilant, or hopeful. Or most importantly, feel love. Because when that happens, I'm not living. I cannot afford not to live.
Besides, I know of one professor who will call me on it.