Opting Out of Overwhelming
My brain does not work “properly” when I am feeling strong emotions. I lose the ability to speak when I am overcome with emotion. When this happens to me, I shut down. If I have any amount of control left, I sit staring stoically at nothing and any word I am able to force out is in a barely audible monotone and most likely supposed to be either “whatever”, “nothing”, or “lea’m’alone”. Otherwise, I begin to weep inconsolably and any word I try to form becomes either a high-pitched wail or a stuttering and guttural moan of anguish.
So, I learned very young that I must stifle my emotion just to navigate in the world. I developed a way to completely switch off my emotions by dissociating myself from the events around me. Externally, I present a calm and placid demeanor, smiling at everyone and laughing all the time. Internally, I am blank.
When I say I am blank, I actually mean it. My emotional slate is blank – there is chalk dust and eraser marks, but there is no writing on the board. My brain is working, logging all the events as they happen and noting any corresponding emotions I should express at the proper times. I do not feel an internal emotional response to external stimuli unless I specifically allow myself to feel emotion.
I do realize that this is probably hard to comprehend because it doesn’t make a lot of sense. I can explain it only this way: I am physically and mentally present, but I am not emotionally present.
Right now, as I type this, I feel blank. I am sitting here, trying to explain to you what I do not feel because I am not allowing myself to feel anything. The past month has been miserable for me, and when I allow myself to feel anything, I quickly become overwhelmed. I end up pouring out my thoughts on this blog because I don’t have any other way to get the feelings out. I am woefully inept at explaining how I really feel, so I end up writing lengthy messages wherein I am explaining to myself and to you [the reader] things I can’t understand while they are inside my head and causing me emotional torment.
Yesterday, I let my guard down because I was physically tired due to a series of wakeful nights. I ended up having to run outside into the forest to lean against a pine tree, uttering any words that came to my mind to the tree so that I could get them out of my head. I tried to let myself cry to release some adrenocorticotropic (stress) hormones so I could chill out, but only succeeded in getting one long tear to stream down the left side of my face.
It is extremely difficult for me to cry. My son once told me he had never seen me cry. I had never realized that before. Of course, I immediately thought of all the stories I’d heard of “tough men” who never cry, and I wonder if they were really like me, or if they truly never had to cry. I asked him if it bothered him much and he said it didn’t; he just thought it was a little weird. I still don’t think he has seen me cry. I rarely cry.
So, if you see me crying, there is something terribly wrong with me. If I am crying, I am most likely on the edge of death – actively wishing for death to claim me. When I get to the point where I am weeping for no apparent reason, I am so tired in my soul that I am ready to lie down and die right then and there.
I have tried to explain this to people, but I don’t seem to get the point across well enough. I cry so I will not die. When I become overwhelmed by the dam of emotion that builds up, my two options are to let it out somehow or lose consciousness.
When I am weeping, I am feeling all negative emotions one normally feels over the course of [whatever specific amount of time I’ve remained emotionless], all at once. I am overcome with grief, anger, despondency, fear, confusion, sadness, incredulity, hopelessness, worthlessness, helplessness, disgust, hate, frustration, and an immense sense of injustice.
At any other time, it is difficult for me to cry at all, even when I am alone. I just don’t see a point in wasting time crying. I make up for lack of emotion with ingenuity or helpfulness or laughter at the bizarre nature of the world. I find humor everywhere, but I don’t know if that counts as “an emotion” – I just can find something funny no matter what I’m doing. Sometimes, it is very difficult for me to turn my deeper emotions back “on”. When I am an emotional person, I feel emotion very acutely and it causes me to act in strange, confusing, and erratic ways.
I have existed for the past 25 years as a quasi-emotional person. In the few years before my emotionless façade was formed, I had the tantrums and fits and rages that an overwhelmed person has when s/he is upset. One day, I became so angry that I “saw red”, having the thought that I literally wanted to kill my older brother for breaking a crayon of mine. After screaming incoherently and beating on him and finally having him sit on my stomach and arms until I stopped trying to fight him, my anger turned to tears.
I realized the extremity and vast overreaction of that response to the real situation. That scared me, a lot, that I could lose all rational thought and self-control over something so small. I realized that I was going to have to figure out how to get away from that type of emotion. So, at the grand old age of three and a half, when I learned to control my temperament, those fits largely disappeared. I began to evolve into the reserved, unaffected, smiling person I usually present to the world.
The past three years, I have learned to express some emotion without becoming overwhelmed, but I am still working on this. I have trouble gauging how much feeling I can feel before I become trapped in the emotions. I don’t want to lose the ability to communicate, which is why I stopped feeling emotion in the first place, but I still can’t always communicate in the ways that I need to.
It’s very confusing to me how it is all supposed to fit together. I don’t understand the reason that I am like this. I can’t understand the “why me” part of this – a lot of the time, I just wish I could be “normal” and have normal levels of emotion like everybody else.
I figure I’m supposed to be learning something from all of this, but I still have no idea what it is. I’ve survived because I can dissociate myself from my emotions and look at my behavior in an objective way. I don’t want to just survive anymore, though. I want to LIVE INSIDE my life, not exist outside of it.
I’m tired of watching my life through a peephole.