Full Throttle Technicolour

I have never done anything by halves. If I do something, I do it big. I'll write 6 essays as revision for one topic, instead of just a couple. I won't try to raise just £100, or even £1000- I'll aim for £2015, and I'll aim to do it in a year to boot. I won't just ask how someone is, I'll double-check and triple-check and probably send them cheese jokes at odd times too. My school projects are never just posters; they're full on booklets with interactive presentations. I do not believe in half measures.

I don't feel things by halves, either. If I go to see a movie and I like it, it isn't a good movie. It's the best movie ever. If I dislike it, I hated it, it was a complete waste of time, it was the worst thing. I talk in superlatives, not for effect, but because my heart talks in superlatives, too. I am not lying when I tell you you're breath-taking, or that the cake you gave me was the best cake ever, or that I have had the most wonderful day. That is just how I do things.

I live life at full throttle and in technicolour. Everything I feel and experience, I feel and experience at full blast, at some emotional 120%. I do not know how to do half-speed, or shades of colour. I never have.

I know that I am unusual in this respect. I know this because a relative once commented that I have always had heightened emotions. I know this because people look at me funny when I am getting over-excited about fish, or spring, or the music that's playing in the distance. I know this because I went to a gig this week, and I am still filled up with it all, still hungrily following the social media accounts of the band members so that I can revel in it further, still listening to the songs on Youtube, still playing my favourite bits over and over again- even whilst the rest of the world has moved on.

It's glorious, you know, living life like this. It really is. I am lucky to feel things the way I do, and I am aware of that. I am often so filled up with delight and wonder, and that is such a blessing. I get so, so much where many others don't, and that is incredible. I live life at full throttle and in technicolour; I cannot imagine it any other way, and nor would I want to.

That's not to say it doesn't get tiring, though. I feel everything so much more than most people, that, naturally, the crash is harder to deal with. When I get a post-gig comedown, it's not just feeling a bit sad that it's over. It's wondering how on earth life will ever be the same again, now that that particular gig has ended. It's refusing to watch the last episode of a programme, because I know I will cry and feel like a part of me is missing at the end. It's not really knowing what to do with myself when I've seen friends, or when something good has happened, because my head doesn't know how to get back down from Cloud Nine.

I feel all the good things more, but I feel all the bumps in the road that bit more too. I will be sleepless over Syria. I will cry for the deaths of people I have never meet, will never meet, will never have to care about. I will find myself scrolling through articles talking about the closure of a theme park I never visited, feeling a sense of loss as I look at the derelict site.

And that's difficult, you know? It gets exhausting, feeling everything so much, so acutely.

It's hard, too, to find people who get it. The majority of the population, those who see the world as it is, tend to humour me a bit. Or tell me to get over it. Or just shrug their shoulders and dub me eccentric. Or, y'know, laugh at me (not with me, and not in a nice way). Or, mostly, just be really really confused. The rest of the world doesn't care about the Instagram post from one of the members of that band I went to see earlier this week. The rest of the world would like me to shut up about the tambourine player now, please and thank you.

There's a language problem, too. The English language isn't made for people like me. It's made for people who are satisfied with a 'good', maybe stretching to a 'really good' or a once in a while 'amazing'. That's not my language. 'Amazing' and 'incredible' are my commonplace- and where do you go from there? Maybe that's why people don't understand, because I'm lacking the words to tell them. Maybe that's why I often feel frustrated when describing things, because I'm trying to navigate a language that isn't really made for absolute technicolour.

There are limitations and difficulties, to this world of full throttle technicolour; but it's still worth it. I get to feel everything, like permanently dancing in a thunderstorm, and feeling alive. Who wouldn't want that? Maybe it's the rest of the world that I- and the others like me- should be humouring.