Not my art! Not sure who or where to credit.
My numbness Journey:
. I am told I cried a lot as a baby. This makes sense, I was a very sick baby. I don’t remember being a baby, of course, so I don’t know if I had any emotions or not then.
. I learned as a toddler to sit still without making noise or doing anything ‘distracting’ during church services and such that lasted the better part of the day. I remember most of that feeling ‘blank.’ Like someone had pointed a remote at me and pressed pause. I remember sitting on the folding chairs at church next to my mom, and my feet didn’t even hang over the edge of the chair yet because I was so small, and I remember my arms feeling “prickly” because I hadn’t moved them in so long. It became kind of a game to sit still long enough to make my limbs prickly before I changed position in my chair. My parents were not the kind of parents who gave their babies dry Cheerios to snack on, or old spice shakers with toothpicks in them to play with during church. We sat still and we listened, or we got taken out and punished and then brought back in to sit still and listen. There was no such thing as children’s church.
. Displays of emotion and expression were often harshly punished beginning before I turned one, judging by how soon I know it started for my younger siblings. E.g. 3 hour spanking/restraining sessions for crying, social shaming for laughing (“don’t be foolish. Be sober minded.”), I never attempted dancing it was considered so out of the question, etc. I got in trouble a lot, for all the normal kid stuff like being too loud with my sisters in bed at night or arguing over a toy or not finishing my food or not obeying instructions cheerfully and right away. My parents were just picking up a lot of child training techniques from ultra conservative fundamentalist literature, and trying out what they were reading on me and my siblings.
. I sometimes felt too emotional to maintain a calm exterior during really intense moments (I equated emotions with danger) like altar calls or punishments or questionings, and learned to distract myself as hard as I could until the emotions passed. I’d count things like nails in the boards on the walls, or I’d focus on my shoes, or I’d focus on my baby siblings and make sure they had their shoes tied etc. Eventually I got really good at just kind of zoning out, I remember very often feeling like I was floating in the corner of the room, looking down at all of us kneeling and praying. I wondered a lot if I was a robot or possessed, because my body didn’t feel familiar or as real as the people around me seemed. My body usually felt stiff and mechanical, like I was watching myself move from the outside. Maybe, I thought, that’s what dying to the flesh meant. When I broke down and felt emotions it was overwhelming and I would cry, which was punished, and shamed. Because of those times, I consider(ed) myself emotional in a sort of ‘hysterical/unreliable woman’ sense.
. I got good at autopilot when I had a lot of work to do, like from 9 years old or so. I remember waking up and relishing the hour or so of feeling ‘awake’ before I’d get tired and flip the switch to autopilot so I didn’t slow down. Working hard was the best thing a kid could do, really, the safest thing and the most encouraged virtue. I remember watching people who were considered hard workers and trying to copy them, I decided the trick to picking beans fast was to never let your hands stop moving. I really like watching my hands work, and wash dishes, pick beans, type. It’s kinda comforting, reassuring, safe, yknow? I can work through almost anything, pain and tiredness and nausea and emotions. I was always surprised by burnout. I also considered myself lazy, so it’s odd that objectively I was a hard worker. But today I’m not a hard worker, all my hard work was thanks to autopilot and numbing and dissociation.
. In my early teens, I got pretty good at just not having “negative” emotions. I’d never felt anger very strongly, but I began to feel less sadness or annoyance too. If I started feeling sad, I’d just stop. Distract. Numb. Life was not easy, so I was numb pretty much all the time. It was painful. Sometimes I couldn’t even get up to work, I’d just sit on my bed, which was punished of course but I had nothing in me to react to the punishment and nothing in me to give to my work so I just sat there and took it. I had a Bible study group that read this book which told of the author’s own experience with depression and how she found happiness via a combination of Christianity and gratitude journaling. I started looking for things to be thankful for. It was like a dam broke and I could finally FEEL something again: happiness. I found joy in everything. The sky, my work, the people around me, sounds, smells, trees, colors, banana muffins. Everything was still half awful, but I just decided that part wasn’t important. Go numb for the bad, experience the good. It let me function again. It worked for a while.
. Eventually, I had ✨ a meltdown ✨ I got diagnosed with ptsd. I hit a burnout point with my mission work + school + other job + multiple deaths of close loved ones + buried trauma beginning to resurface due to my coping skills wearing thin and my new relatively safe environment and supportive school friends. Covid was the last straw. I quit EVERYTHING. Mission work, school, other job, everything. And I finally felt anger, and sadness, and regret, and shame, and so much fear.
. All that bs in therapy about “let’s name the wall you’ve put up between you and your emotions, what would it be made of? Wood? Metal? Brick? Paper?” & “it’s safe to have emotions. Practice recognizing your emotions and telling them that it’s safe to be there.” didn’t seem like bs anymore. It actually helped make sense of the storm of emotions I was having. Because I hadn’t felt anger in so long, or at least not without it being kind of ‘intellectual’ or ‘in the distance’, I didn’t really recognize it. I just felt strongly and vaguely bad. But I started untangling it all and figuring out which emotion was which and different ways to recognize them and experience them and let them have their place. Making art helped, talking about it helped.
. The storm has died down now. I still numb regularly, often automatically, without thinking about it. But I do have all the emotions now, at least to some degree, and I know how to lean into them and process them a little better. I write down my emotions from the week and how it was, where it was, why it was, every week for therapy. Sometimes I have emotions at the right times and sometimes not. Usually I can mask them pretty well if I want to. I still can’t just cry, I can’t make noise when I cry, I haven’t been able to do that since I was very small. But at least I can cry again. My goal is no longer to Not Experience ‘Negative’ Emotions, it’s to give place to every emotion that I have. Wholeness, not Happiness. I feel more grounded. I have bad days, I have consecutive bad days.
And I am happy. I never really stopped being able to find joy in things, ever since that one Bible study book about gratitude. I’m really very lucky in that, I think. I have gone and can go through life enjoying it.