Emotional.

I was a very emotional kid growing up. I don't know why, maybe it was because I never had my dad around while I was growing up telling me to be tougher and that men don't cry. Maybe it was because my mom worked in the medical field and I would always see her coming home emotional. Maybe it was because that's just who I am.

I remember when I was in fifth grade I had my first crush on this girl named Lauren. I guess I was always a hopeless romantic, cause even at that young age I wanted to marry this girl and spend the rest of my life with her. I would always do nice things for her, write her notes, defend her when people would say bad things about her - she didn't care. The last day of fifth grade I brought a little red journal for everyone to write in (since we didn't have yearbooks in elementary school) and I will never forget what she wrote: "Eric, I'm going to a different school than you next year so I will never see you again. Goodbye." I didn't see what she wrote until school was out. I remember walking out of class to that big tree in front of the school office, I pulled the journal out of my backpack and read it - as soon as I saw what she wrote I shoved it back into my backpack and ran home, it wasn't far - only 0.7 miles (I just looked it up) but as soon as I got home I locked the door to the empty house, dove face down onto the rough brown couch and cried for hours. My mom wouldn't get home until around nine at night and I remember going to the bathroom and washing my face off around 8:45 to make sure she couldn't tell I had been crying.

It's easy to think that I was young, and kids just have that kind of emotional response - but it extended far past my youth. When I was a freshman in high school I wore a tie to school one day and a bird pooped right on it. When I went to the bathroom to take off the tie and wash it I noticed my eyes were starting to well up - over bird poop on a tie. If the Eric of today would have been in that restroom with the Eric of then I would tell myself to suck it up, that it's just bird poop and it's just a tie - but I wasn't.

After that day, and playing football and toughening up I realized that I needed to control my emotions, I realized that men don't cry, I realized that I needed to suppress my emotions.

That was only perpetuated by my career choice, seeing suffering and death every day - dealing with high stress situations on a fairly consistent basis - it hardened me, and I thought this was a good thing. I now realize it's not.

See, there's a time and a place to express your emotions - I hardened myself, I sealed my emotional vault and wouldn't let anyone in. I wouldn't even tell the person closest to me when I was hurting, I wouldn't tell my best friend when I wanted to cry. I still felt the emotions, and I guess since I bottled them up and locked them away I felt them more often in places that truly were silly - like watching 50 First Dates or Click. I bottled them up and then let them blow up. Even though I was the one that always talked about letting stuff out before it blows up.

I hurt people. I hurt people close to me, people that will never be able to truly forgive me. All because I was blind to what I had become, and I was deaf to their words that tried to warn me of it. Now I must suffer the consequences.

It's very easy to be overwhelmed. It's very easy to wallow in my own self pity or my own self disappointment but where does that get me? Nowhere.

Being emotional isn't wrong. There is a such thing as being overly-emotional, but my solution was to be completely without emotion. I'm confident that my solution was the greater of the two evils.