You Can’t Heal What You Can’t Feel
A slow descent into silence..
I wish I could tell you that after the first few weeks, things began to turn.
But they didn’t.
What followed was six long months of fog, fear, and failure.
Or at least — that’s how it felt.
My short-term memory was gone. I couldn’t hold a thought in place.
I’d lose track mid-sentence, mid-step, mid-breath.
I kept thinking:
What if this is permanent?
What if I’m broken now?
The Search for a Fix
I tried everything.
Stress coaches. Massage therapists. Psychiatrists.
Some told me to talk. Some told me to walk.
Some gave me pills — sleeping aids, antidepressants, anti-anxiety meds.
I said yes to everything.
Because saying no felt like giving up.
But nothing reached what I was going through.
At best, I floated.
At worst, I disappeared.
Emotional Numbness
Here’s the thing I didn’t understand back then:
I wasn’t just tired.
I wasn’t just anxious.
I was emotionally frozen.
And if I’m honest — that didn’t start with stress.
I hadn’t felt anything real in a long time.
Not truly.
Not joy. Not sorrow. Not anger.
Just function. Just forward motion.
I had lived for for most of my life without a working emotional compass —
unable to see the direction I was heading,
because I no longer had access to the part of me that could feel when I was drifting.
My body had been trying to speak for a long time.
But I couldn’t hear it.
And still, I kept trying to do my way out of it.
More techniques. More knowledge. More effort.
Because deep down, I still believed that healing was something you could earn —
if only you did enough of the right things.
But slowly — painfully slowly — I would come to realize:
You can’t heal what you can’t feel.
You can’t bypass the body.
You can’t push past the pain.
You can’t think your way into wholeness,
if you’ve forgotten how to listen.
These months were not the beginning of healing.
They were the slow unraveling of everything I’d used to hold myself together.
In the next post, I’ll share how feeling slowly began to return — and how that, too, was terrifying.
📘 Disclaimer
This post reflects personal experience and speculative thought. It is not intended as medical advice or scientific conclusion — only as a quiet offering from one person’s process of listening and remembering.