After three days of being on the verge of insanity, I spent three days medicated into complete emotionlessness. To top that off, I outdid myself once more by not wuite jumping off into the abysmal infinity of bottomless dementia.

Regardless, I realized something during those seven days in hell. I realized that what makes us different from animals is not a particular possesion of speech and language domination, or the social differentiations we rarely find in animals; instead, what makes us different is our emotions and the way that we react to them. Animals feel fear and run or attack; they feel all the “calls of nature” and respond to them accordingly. But humans react to many more things, and have different reactions depending on the situations from which their feeling originate. One may walk away from anger, or attack, or just yell and scream. Humans are complex bundles of emotions; and when rendered emotionless, they are human no more. No emotions means no passion, no desire, no drive; and leads to no thoughts, or actions, or reactions, or even a continuum of what we know as life.

The worse part is that we think of emotions as weakness and/or evil, depending on what reactions they trigger. No one wants to see someone else cry, or to cry him/herself. People don’t see a person who lost his/her mind to his/her emotions as justified in hurting another human being, even if this person did whatever it was because he/she felt imminent threat to their well-being (e.g. battered wife who killed her husband because he was getting drunk and she knew that would lead to his abusing her).

Emotions and what we do about them is really what distinguishes us from animals. Emotions are what move us from one situation into another. What leads us to choose our lives, our friends, our partners. Emotions guide us from birth to death, into learning and ignorance, north or southbound. We do things because we feel things, and that specific drive is what being human is.

No wonder humans are all fallible.