I had this experience of waking up one morning, gasping, and clutching my chest, and feeling as though my emotions were literally being pulled out of my chest. That happened sometime when I was in middle school and, since then, I haven’t been able to feel emotions the same way ever since. It’s like knowing you’re happy or sad, but not feeling happy or sad. It’s something I still heavily struggle with today.

I don’t know if anyone else feels the same way I do – at least, I hope I’m not the only one. I don’t know how to explain what it feels like other than an emptiness in my chest. I can still emote happiness and sadness, I can still feel grief and loss. I tend to be more affected by negative emotions more strongly than happy emotions. I still smile and laugh and enjoy others’ company, but it never feels like genuine feelings. I don’t feel warm. When I feel sad or cry, it feels like a deep, eternal sadness. I cry easily when watching movies too, even when it’s one of those happy scenes where you’re so happy you can cry – sometimes I do cry. I cry easily at weddings, too. It doesn’t really make sense. It feels dissociative.

I still feel anxiety – it’s probably one of the strongest feelings I experience. Worry, stress, fear. Maybe it’s my body still trying to recover from trauma. Maybe the emotional numbness will eventually go away when my mind and body fully recover. Maybe it never goes away and I never fully recover. I figured the start of the emotional numbness was some sort of defense mechanism to prevent myself from further harm, and I still believe that’s true today. If I’m still so emotional when I’m emotionally numb for the majority of the time, I’d probably be an emotional wreck all of the time when I do feel genuine emotions. I hope that some day, I reach a point where I no longer have anything to stress or worry about and I can feel again.

It’s stressful not feeling emotions, especially when being involved in a romantic relationship because I’m constantly questioning how I feel. You might wonder how I can even be in romantic relationships when I’m emotionally numb. I wonder, too.

I know I can love someone romantically despite not feel any kind of genuine emotion of love – no butterflies, giddiness, or a warm feeling in my chest. I just know that I love them. I suppose it’s akin to feeling a lot of care for someone, knowing how much you’d do for another person simply because you care for them. The difference between knowing someone as a lover or a friend.

I felt something for him when we first met – an overwhelming amount of emotion and feeling that I couldn’t explain and hadn’t truly felt in a very long time (or at all from what I can remember). I had to avoid eye contact with him when first meeting him because the longer I held eye contact with him, the stronger the emotions felt and they were already so overwhelming. It was absolutely jarring. The feeling was still there on our first date. The nervousness, butterflies, warm feeling – but also juxtaposed with anxiety and trying to figure out what the feeling was. This was probably the only time I’d ever felt like that since that morning in middle school – or at least that I can remember.

But after our first date and we began dating exclusively, those feelings vanished. Back to emotional numbness. How could I go from feeling something so strongly and so overwhelmingly for someone to going back to feeling nothing at all? I know I care for him, I know I love him.

We had talked about it before. He suggested that maybe the feelings were also a mixture of uncertainty and wonder – whether we’d actually start dating or not, and so when we did, the element of wonder was gone.

But the lack of feeling makes me question and it makes me feel like a fraud, which just stresses me out more. There are moments where I look at him and feel love for him, where I do feel some warmth and truly know I love him and care deeply for him. Other times, I look at him and wonder how we even got here. Although, we both wonder how we got here because everything just seemed to happen with each other. One day we were strangers, ignorant of each other’s existence, and the next day it was like we just knew we loved each other. Love at first sight, I dare say.

Are the fleeting emotions just another symptom of being a highly sensitive person? Being so sensitive to external factors like weather, music, noise, smells, others’ behaviors, anything – can highly affect how I feel in the moment. There could be a specific noise I hear or fragrance I smell that I don’t like and it’ll put me in a bad mood and that could affect how I’m feeling towards him, whether I entertain his shenanigans or not. The hot weather lately has also been affecting my mood and I know it makes me more irritable.

Other times I think what I feel is completely normal because you don’t feel love for someone all the time. You can’t expect to be in love with someone every second of every day. They’re going to annoy you or frustrate you sometimes, but in the overall scheme of things, you still love them. A tiff or misunderstanding here or there doesn’t mean the end of a relationship.

I have been feeling disconnected lately. There are conversations we’ve had where I don’t feel understood or heard, or I feel disregarded. These conversations happened one after another recently, and that’s probably why I feel disconnected. Though, this doesn’t seem to shake the foundation we have. I feel disconnected, but it doesn’t feel like a big thing. It feels temporary, it’s probably just me – in my head – or it’s probably not related to the relationship at all.

I do feel like I have been dissociating more than normal lately. I’ve questioned whether it’s just a sensory processing thing. I have to put in a lot of effort to listen to something to actually understand what’s going on. I can hear a song, but I have to actively put in a lot of effort to actually hear the lyrics. It’s happened more than a few times recently. I can be listening to a friend talking, but when they actually ask a question, I realize I don’t actually know what they said. It feels like I’m constantly distracted but not actually focusing on anything at all. I can also look at something, but not be looking at any particular thing, so I’m not really registering anything that I’m looking at. So if anyone were to ask me, “Did you see that ____?” in the same direction I’m looking at, chances are I didn’t. Maybe I’m just so used to being in the background and just observing rather than actively participating. Maybe I’m just tired.

Maybe it’s all just another symptom of depression, anxiety, and PTSD. It’s difficult to learn how to live outside of your head, when you’ve been stuck in your head for 10+ years. It’s hard to not give the thoughts in your head so much attention and power now when those thoughts had so much power before – enough to affect you physically and try to end your life. It’s hard to retrain yourself and your mind. And it’s not until moments like these where you realize you have to retrain your mind and actively put in the work to look at what’s in front of you rather than in your head.