I Don’t Feel Sad Anymore. I Don’t Feel Much of Anything.

I used to cry at songs. At random videos of strangers reuniting at airports. At texts from people I loved. I used to feel things so loudly they kept me up at night.

Now I lie awake and feel nothing. Just this quiet, hollow hum. Like a room where the music stopped but the speakers are still on.

I noticed it first in small moments.

Someone told me something exciting and I smiled. But I was watching myself smile from somewhere far away. Like I was performing the right reaction instead of actually having one.

That scared me more than I let on.

The coffee tastes the same every morning. My favorite show is just noise on a screen now. I scroll. I stop. I scroll again. Not looking for anything. Not really bored. Just… running on some kind of automatic mode I don’t remember switching on.

This is what emotional numbness actually feels like, by the way.

It’s not dramatic. It’s not crying in the shower.

It’s ordering food you used to love and feeling nothing when it arrives.

People around me are living. Laughing loudly. Getting angry. Falling in love. Breaking down.

And I’m watching all of it like it’s happening behind glass.

I’m not depressed, I tell myself. I’m fine. I’m functioning. I go to work. I answer messages. I say “I’m good, how are you?” probably a hundred times a week.

But good has started to mean nothing. It’s just the word I use so nobody asks follow-up questions.

There’s a specific kind of loneliness in this.

Not the loneliness of being alone in a room. The loneliness of being surrounded by people and still feeling like you’re the only one who can’t access whatever they’re all feeling.

Like everyone else got a map and you’re just walking in the same circles hoping something eventually lands.

I think it started with too much. Too much noise. Too much pretending. Too many days of pushing through things I never actually processed.

Emotional burnout doesn’t announce itself. It just quietly takes things from you. First the big feelings. Then the small ones.

Then one day you’re standing in the kitchen at midnight eating crackers and you realize you genuinely cannot remember the last time you felt genuinely moved by something.

And you’re not even sad about that. Which is the point.

The overthinking is still there. That never left.

But it’s cold now. Analytical. My brain runs through every scenario, every conversation, every possible outcome — and at the end of all that analysis, there’s just. Nothing. No fear. No excitement. No relief.

Just thoughts sitting in a room with no furniture.

Someone asked me recently if I was happy.

I paused longer than I meant to.

Not because I was sad. But because I genuinely didn’t know what to compare it to anymore. Happy against what? Against when? I couldn’t remember the reference point.

I said “yeah, mostly.” And changed the subject.

I think what hurts the most — when I can feel things enough to notice what hurts — is that I used to be someone who felt everything so deeply it was almost a problem.

People told me I was too sensitive. Too emotional. That I needed to toughen up.

I don’t know if this is what they meant. But somewhere along the way, I did.

And now I’d give anything to feel something too loudly again.

To cry at an airport video.

To lie awake because a feeling is too big to sleep through.

I’m not writing this because I have an answer. I don’t.

I’m writing this because I think a lot of people are walking around in this same quiet fog and calling it fine. Calling it adulting. Calling it busy. Calling it tired.

And maybe it is all of those things.

But maybe it’s also grief. For the version of yourself who could still feel the full weight of being alive.

I don’t know how to get back there yet.

But I remembered how it felt.

And for tonight, that’s something.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​