“I had to feel everything in order to feel nothing so I could feel everything.”
There is a peculiar kind of exhaustion that comes from being a person.
Not the exhaustion of missed sleep or long workdays, but the one that arrives after years of paying attention. After years of caring. After years of trying to understand why certain things happen, why certain people leave, why time seems to speed up just when you’ve finally learned how to live inside it.
When I was younger, I believed every feeling deserved an answer.(not that i have changed a lot)
If I was anxious, there had to be a reason. If I was lonely, there had to be someone missing. If I was disappointed, surely there was a lesson waiting patiently behind it all. I treated every emotion like a puzzle that could be solved if I simply thought hard enough.
So I thought.
I replayed conversations that had long since ended. I questioned decisions I had already made. I imagined different futures, different versions of myself, different lives that might have unfolded if only I had chosen differently. I carried expectations that belonged to other people without realizing I had picked them up. I mourned things that had never really existed outside my imagination.
I felt everything.
Not because life demanded it, but because I believed feeling deeply was the same as understanding deeply.
It isn’t.
Eventually, there came a time when I couldn’t feel much at all.
Nothing terrible had happened. Nothing extraordinary had changed. It was simply as though my inner world had grown quiet after years of constant conversation. The highs were softer. The lows less consuming.
At first, I thought I had lost something essential.
I worried that I had become indifferent. That perhaps I had grown colder than I intended. We tend to speak about numbness as though it is something broken, something to fear. We rarely consider that it might also be a form of rest.
Looking back, I don’t think I stopped feeling.
I think I had simply reached the edge of what I could carry.
There is a limit to how much the human heart can hold before it asks, for silence.
And silence, I have learned, is not always empty.
Get Hitanshi baisoya’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
Sometimes it is where life patiently waits for us to return.
It happens in ways so ordinary they are almost impossible to notice. You find yourself laughing without remembering when you forgot how.
Perhaps growing older has less to do with becoming wiser than with becoming gentler toward yourself. You stop demanding explanations for every season of your life. You accept that not every friendship lasts forever, that not every dream survives contact with reality, and that not every version of yourself is meant to stay.
Some selves exist only to lead you to the next one.
I used to think life was measured by its defining moments like the devastating losses. Now I suspect differently.
The Tuesdays. The walks taken without a destination. For me though when i completely isolate myself from reality and every saturday try to reinvent myself.
The small rituals that stitch one ordinary day to the next until, years later, you realize they were your life all along.
Perhaps that is why I had to feel everything.
I had to (all of us) experience the weight of expectation, uncertainty, ambition, disappointment, hope, grief, joy, loneliness, wonder, and all the unnamed emotions that exist somewhere between them. I had to let them move through me instead of trying to outrun them. ( also i use to call mysellf a runner, running from emotions, people, writing this post, yeah yeah you get it)
Only then did I discover the strange gift hidden inside emotional exhaustion.
When there was nothing left to chase, nothing left to prove, nothing left to analyse, the world became visible again.
Not as something I needed to understand.
But as something I could simply experience like the comfort of my own company.
I used to believe that feeling everything would eventually break me.( dead serious i have been afraid of feeling feelings good or bad)
Instead, it taught me that the heart has its own rhythm and that is alive.
Maybe that is what growing up really is.
that I had to feel everything.
Until I felt nothing.
but i am still figuring out because i haven’t felt then i have never Only lived.
