Why You Feel Nothing at All
It isn't sadness. That's the part that confuses everyone, including you. Sadness would at least be something — a weight, a texture, a feeling you could point to. This is flatter than that. You go through the day doing what needs doing, saying the right things in the right places, and somewhere behind your eyes there's just a kind of grey static where a response used to be. Good news lands and you wait to feel glad, and the gladness doesn't come. Bad news lands and you wait to feel the drop, and there's only a distant note of oh. You're not falling apart. You're not in pieces. You're just… not really here, and you've been quietly wondering, for a while now, whether something in you has switched off for good. This is numbness, and it's real What you're describing has a name — emotional numbness — and it's far more common than the silence around it suggests, because it's almost impossible to talk about. Sadness you can say out loud; p...
