Why do I feel flat
instead of sad?

Flat is not the same as fine

For a long time I read my own flatness as calm, and so did everyone around me. I was not falling apart. I got up, I worked, I remembered the birthdays. From the outside it looked like I had come through something.

From the inside it was more like living behind glass. What nobody had told me is that the good things go quiet at the same time as the bad ones. My system had no dial that turned down only the difficult feelings. It turned everything down, so I lost delight at the same rate I lost grief.

You may recognise the smaller version. Good news that does not land. A film everyone else cried at. A holiday you were looking forward to, spent watching yourself enjoy it from a slight distance.

Why it happens to women who carried a lot

Feeling takes time and it takes safety, and for years I had neither.

I was holding a household, a marriage, a job, and everyone’s moods. Having my own reaction to any of it was a luxury with a cost attached. Somebody needed dinner. Somebody needed me steady. So the reaction got postponed, and postponed, and in the end my system stopped bothering to produce it at all.

The older version of it, from long before

There is an older version of it in me too, and it started long before any of the carrying. Somewhere early on I worked out that my feelings, said out loud, made things harder for the people around me. So I turned them down. At the time that was the intelligent thing to do, and it was still running decades later. Yours may have learned something of its own.

The one thing I will not guess at

Flatness has more than one cause, and I have no way of knowing which one is yours. I only know what mine was.

Mine was years of carrying. That is the only story I can tell you honestly, and it is not the only story there is. A body that has been flat for a long time deserves someone qualified looking at it, not a woman on the internet working it out on your behalf.

Please take it to your doctor as well

So please take it to your doctor as well. Not instead of anything here. Alongside it. And if the flatness comes with hopelessness, or with any sense that things would be easier if you were not here, please treat that as urgent and talk to someone today.

What began to bring it back

Not insight. I understood my numbness very well long before I felt anything, which taught me that understanding lives on the top floor and this problem lives in the basement.

The body came back before the mind

It came back through the body first, which is not where anyone expects to start. Warm water. Cold air on the face. The weight of a blanket. Sitting there feeling nothing at all and noticing only that your hands are warm. That is the whole exercise, and it is a much lower rung than most of what gets written about this starts on.

Then small amounts of quiet. Not in order to relax, because relaxing is not available yet. Just long enough for something underneath to register that nobody is asking for anything.

Then a few lines a day on paper nobody is ever going to read. Feelings that will not come when you look straight at them turn up sideways in writing.

And saying it out loud to one safe person. Plainly, without dressing it up or making it funny. That one costs more than all the rest of it put together.

And time, which is a poor answer and cannot be left out.

What came back first

What comes back first is rarely what you would expect. Often it is irritation, which is not enjoyable and is a good sign. Then something small and sensory, out of all proportion to itself. Grief comes back much later, and when it does the reason the door was held shut for so long becomes obvious.

You do not always get a say in how it arrives, or in what order, or whether it makes any sense at the time. Mine came out sideways more than once, in the wrong place, over something that did not seem to warrant it. I have no good rationale for those days even now. That is all right too.

One small first step

If you have been reading this waiting to find out whether you are broken, you are not. A woman who feels nothing after decades of feeling everything on behalf of everybody has a system that did exactly what systems do.

The Over-Giver’s Check-In is free and takes a few minutes. Twenty quiet signs of a life organised around everyone else, and one small step at the end. It asks nothing of you that you cannot do lying down.

And please do talk to your doctor as well. Both things can be true at once.