—Anonymous
Emily Dickinson’s “My Life had Stood – a Loaded Gun” (764) is a poem that impacted the way I view myself and a poem that changed how I want myself to be. Dickinson uses the analogy of a gun to demonstrate the importance of being able to control your emotions and the dangers of not doing so. The reason I find myself relating to this poem so much is because of my last breakup. To make an incredibly long story short, I always found myself unable to control my emotions in my relationship. As I am sure every single one of us has learned (or will learn), you cannot do that. You just cannot. It does not work. You will fuck it up. Most of us have to fuck it up at least once before we can learn. It will lead to disagreements, arguments, and fights. Obviously, these things will happen but our goal should be to minimize them so that when they do happen we can learn from them instead of thinking, “Oh shit, here we go again”. So, I fucked up. I was not able to control my emotions in the way I should have while we were together. While this may have not been the primary reason we broke up, it definitely did not help. What made things worse was my inability to control my emotions after our breakup. Instead of either reconciling or moving on, I decided to get high for nine months straight almost 24/7. Now I find myself in a position where is too late to reconcile and I have to find out how to move on while sober while she has already moved on. This is where Dickinson’s poem comes into play. Reading this poem instantly made me think about my own emotional state. It made me realize what I was doing to my ex in a way that I could not have before. It helped me understand my ex more. In a way, reading the poem was comforting. At the end of the day, we are all human and we all experience these emotions. However, it’s easy to forget that and instead beat ourselves up over our past mistakes. It’s important to take a step back and realize that many of us make the same mistakes in our lives. The way society improves is that we collectively try to make fewer and fewer mistakes. In a way, it was also comforting to think that perhaps my ex thought the same way at some point. Maybe she felt that she was also unable to control her emotions at certain times.
