Why Do I Feel Nothing Anymore?

He will confess this to no one he knows: the last time he felt something real, genuinely real, the kind of feeling that arrives uninvited and fills the chest and demands attention, was months ago. He cannot remember what it was. A song, perhaps. A sentence in a film. Something small that slipped past the guard he did not know he had posted at the entrance to his own interior life. Since then, nothing. A long, quiet, unbroken nothing that he wears like a coat, invisible to others, heavy on him.

First, the small deaths. The things that used to matter and stopped mattering without announcement. His favourite meal tastes correct but produces no pleasure. A friend's good news arrives and he types "amazing!!" and the exclamation marks are architecture, not emotion. His mother's voice on the phone is warm and he absorbs the warmth the way a stone absorbs sunlight, on the surface only, without it reaching the interior.

Second, the performance. He is angry about the performance, quietly, steadily, the way a person is angry about a tax they cannot avoid. Every day requires the construction of a face. Not a false face, exactly. A translated one. He translates the nothing into something presentable, something that passes inspection at work, at dinner, in the mirror. The translation is exhausting. It is like writing in a language that is not your own, all day, every day, knowing that the original language, the one that would say what you actually mean, has gone silent.

Third, the comparisons. He watches other people feel things. The colleague who tears up at a retirement speech. The friend who laughs so hard she cannot breathe. The strangers on the metro who argue with a passion that suggests the argument matters to them, that something matters to them, and he observes this the way an anthropologist observes a culture he once belonged to but can no longer access. Feeling is a country he has been deported from. He can see it from across the border. He cannot re-enter.

Fourth, the anger. It is a quiet anger, directed not at the world but at himself. At the suspicion that he has done this to himself, that somewhere along the way he chose efficiency over feeling, chose survival over living, chose the numbness because the alternative, which was vulnerability, was too expensive in a world that charges for softness and rewards for hardness. The anger is the closest thing to a feeling he has, and even the anger is muted, dampened, like a shout heard through water.

Fifth, the search for an explanation. Depression is the obvious candidate and perhaps the correct one. But depression, as he understands it, involves sadness, and sadness involves feeling, and feeling is precisely the thing that is absent. He is not sad. He is not happy. He is not anxious or calm or hopeful or despairing. He is a room with the furniture removed. The dimensions are the same. The space is the same. But the things that made it liveable are gone, and what remains is an emptiness that echoes when he moves through it.

Sixth, the analogy that fits best. He is a television tuned to a channel that is broadcasting, but the volume is at zero and the brightness is turned down and the picture is there, technically, but nobody is watching, not even him, and the remote is somewhere he cannot reach, and the programme, which is his life, plays on without an audience, without a viewer, without anyone to confirm that it is happening at all.

He does not know how this ends. He does not know if it ends. He knows only that the nothing continues, day after day, with the reliability of weather in a city without seasons, and that somewhere inside the nothing there must be something, because a person cannot be entirely empty and still wake up every morning and put on the coat and walk out the door and perform the day. Something keeps him going. He does not know what it is. He does not feel it. But it is there, stubborn and unnamed, in the gap between the nothing and the next morning.