Feeling Everything at Once

[Siúil a Rúin]

This is something I experience, and I was wondering what other people might relate to it. I don't know if it is function related, or age-related, or something else.

There is something in the core of me that feels every emotion and experience of my entire life in one single, complex 'feeling'. I imagine it like a complex sculpture in a dark room with complex lighting revealing an almost incomprehensibly complex image. There is a sense of the whole, but only the ability to glimpse fragments of it consciously. It is intensely bittersweet because it feels every pain and joy as a single entity. It is an intense ache of the soul that is inexpressible.

What is it like for you?

 

[Flâneuse]

I've had the sensation of feeling everything at once, but rather than feeling like a single unified entity that can only be glimpsed in a fragmented way, it was more like a montage of long-repressed feelings attached to memories that suddenly decided to surface, as though months or even years of emotional experience had been compressed into several seconds.

I can relate to feeling contrasting emotions as a single entity in which the differing feelings heighten each other, creating a bittersweet experience more intense than experiencing those emotions separately, but for me it's usually directed at a specific point in time, in response to a single experience. It usually involves (to simplify) both joy and sadness, which amplify each other and create a simultaneous feeling of appreciation and longing. It is when I experience emotions this way that I gain the deepest sense of how beautiful and valuable something is to me, because I both find deep joy in it and grasp either how I will lose it eventually or, in a way that's hard to adequately explain, that there's some distance between me and what I'm responding to that can never be bridged completely.

 

[Peter Deadpan]

This sounds quite spiritual.