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I Stopped Feeling Anything For a Few Weeks
It was one of the most terrifying periods of my life
My mental health, much like anyone else’s, has been up and down throughout my life. Sometimes I was aware of it and sometimes I wasn’t. There were moments of deep sadness, deep anger, a lot of crying, a lot of fear, severe anxiety, and sometimes panic attacks. Until September 2020, I thought my most difficult mental health episode was a claustrophobia breakdown I’d had when I was 14. When I quite literally thought I’d die because I was in a big crowd that I felt I had no escape from.
But I can now confidently say, above and beyond all the raw, painful, and very intense emotional moments of my life, the most terrifying one was when I lost all ability to feel anything at all.
Have you ever stopped feeling anything at all? It’s an empty, empty place to be in, and confusing beyond understanding.
I never did find out for sure what triggered this episode, but I suspect it was a combination of factors. In September 2020, when I stopped feeling, I was going through severe homesickness — having not seen my family in over a year, a lot of stress because I was at odds with my former flatmate who was going out of her way to make me and my partner’s lives miserable, and I was also struggling with serious sleep issues…
