I don’t know how I feel

Well, the title about covers it. I don’t know how I feel. I have been trying to work it out for about a week now and I can’t pinpoint it. I don’t feel the desperate nothingness and crushing solitude of being at the bottom of a depressive episode. There is not a calm and restful place either. I don’t feel like I am squashing down emotions, as this is normally linked with me knowing that this is taking place as one of my coping mechanisms.

I feel like my emotions are MIA; that there ought to be something there, but just isn’t. I have the odd flicker of feeling if something really gets under my skin, but even this lasts only a few minutes and then is gone.

I feel like an automaton. I am doing the things that I have to do to appear fully functional, in a robotic manner. One of my musings is that it is my brain doing what it does best and compartmentalising life, with the emotions part under lock and key, until it feels safe to release this again.

The week before last I had 2 triggering events. The one was an unexpected, punch in the gut kind of email from my ex-husband. I read it and was taken back to the place where things are out of my control; where I need to expect the worst and plan accordingly. I felt fear and extreme anxiety and it was overwhelming. The next, right on the back of the first and whilst my emotions were still raw, was a movie which I didn’t know included abuse of women and children. I stopped watching the movie, but not soon enough. It was the final straw at that point in time. I was in tears and desperately wanted to curl up in the foetal position and shun the world. I didn’t want to see a living soul.

On the plus side, I wasn’t a wreck from depression and anxiety, as I have been in the past. However, I had taken damage to my armour and was struggling to patch it up sufficiently.

Last week saw a continuation of emails from the ex, but now I fully expect there to be some sort of emotional blackmail or snide and demeaning commentary in each of them. Expect the worst and prepare for the worst. So far, he has lived up to my expectations.

I am also in a difficult place financially with continued fallout from Covid having affected my business. So I am taking some measures that a few years ago I would not have considered at all, to keep me afloat. I feel hamstrung by my situation and out of options. I really dislike being pushed into a corner, but nonetheless, here I am, in the corner and throwing punches to try and get out.

The problem is to get out to what? There is the fact that I will have a very temporary fix for my finances, but what then? I have been mulling over what to do if I get here for a while. The option that I like the very least is starting to look like the only possibility. And because I am not feeling anything, I am also not feeling my intuition for some guidance. Although I am wondering if that is just telling me what the next best thing to do is, rather than aiding me in a long term solution.

I am also heading towards not wanting to see people. The longing to just be in my own space, with no outside interaction. The desire to curl up in a ball and just stare out of the window. The hope that some contemplation and reflection might serve up an answer. If not, to numb my brain with a few movies and multiple mugs of tea or coffee, seems like a viable alternative.

I read the above and it seems like a mild form of depression with some dissociation, but I don’t feel like either of those. Then again, I don’t know what to feel.