Dear Strong One: You’re Allowed to Feel Nothing

 

There is a kind of exhaustion that does not announce itself. You still wake up, still answer messages, still complete what needs to be done, and from the outside, everything looks steady. Functional. Responsible. Yet somewhere inside, the volume has lowered. Not into peace, not into clarity, but into something flatter. You are not overwhelmed, but you are not moved either. Joy doesn’t quite land. Anger doesn’t fully rise. Even sadness feels distant, like it belongs to another version of you.

For a long time, I misread this state. I thought it meant I had become detached or avoidant. I thought maybe I was failing to process something important. Therapy eventually helped me see it differently. Emotional numbness is often not absence but protection. When the nervous system has been overstimulated for too long, when stress has accumulated quietly, when vigilance has become normal, the body sometimes conserves instead of collapsing. It narrows the bandwidth so you don’t fragment under the weight of what you are carrying.

We rarely speak gently about this phase. We admire intensity. We celebrate those who feel deeply and articulate their emotions with clarity. But there is another season that deserves dignity, the season when you are tired enough that feeling everything at once would cost too much. Especially for women who are capable, responsible, and used to holding others together, numbness can feel like failure. It can feel like ingratitude or disconnection. It can make you question whether you are still present in your own life.

But numbness is not always a flaw. Sometimes it is calibration. Sometimes it is the body deciding that safety matters more than expression. The system pulls back not because you are cold, but because you are overloaded. You might not be ready to access the anger that would change your boundaries. You might not be ready to feel the grief that would require you to slow down. You might not be ready to hope again because hope feels riskier than disappointment. None of that makes you weak. It makes you human.

When I created Dear Strong One: You’re Allowed to Feel Nothing as Achework Vol. 3, it wasn’t meant to fix anyone. It was meant to offer permission. Permission to sit in the fog without labeling yourself broken. Permission to acknowledge emotional shutdown without turning it into identity. The journal prompts are quiet on purpose. They are there for moments when you feel disconnected, detached, or done pretending you’re okay. If you ever want to move through that space gently, you can find it here.

If you’re using the journal, you don’t have to complete all the prompts at once. In fact, it’s better if you don’t. Choose one question that feels tolerable rather than overwhelming and sit with it for ten or fifteen minutes without editing yourself. If nothing comes up, write that nothing is coming up. That counts. You can return to the same prompt more than once. Emotional numbness does not always unlock through intensity; sometimes it shifts through repetition and safety. And if you open the journal and close it again, that is allowed too. The purpose is not productivity. The purpose is contact, even if that contact is quiet.

There is no urgency attached to this. Numbness does not require immediate correction. It requires awareness. It becomes concerning only when it hardens into permanent avoidance. As a phase, it can be part of recalibration. Systems that have carried too much often need neutrality before they can tolerate intensity again. What matters is not whether you are feeling deeply right now, but whether you are honest about where you are.

Feeling nothing for a while does not mean you will feel nothing forever. When energy returns, it usually returns gradually. You might notice irritation before joy, tenderness before grief, curiosity before hope. The thaw is subtle. You do not have to rush it. You do not have to perform healing. 

You do not have to prove emotional depth to anyone watching. Sometimes the most responsible thing you can do is remain steady in the quiet space without panicking about it. You are still here. Even in silence, even in flatness, even without dramatic emotion, you are still here. And that is not nothing.