Numbness never arrives like a hurricane.
It doesn’t slam doors open, it doesn’t make noise.
Numbness comes like a gentle woman in thick socks,
walking slowly across the floor so it won’t creak.
It doesn’t say, “I’m here.”
It simply sits down.
It sits in the chest, like a slab of stone.
In the stomach, like a heavy silence.
In the throat, like a knot that refuses to become a tear.
In the hands, like a laziness to reach toward the world.
Numbness is intelligent.
It knows that if I hurt too much, I would scream,
and if I felt too good, I would start living chaotically.
So it chooses the middle. Neither white nor black. Gray, tasting like wet paper.
It’s not death, but it’s not life either.
It’s hunger without a stomach,
thirst without a throat,
tiredness without work.
Numbness is the pause between two heartbeats
in which the heart wonders if it’s still worth it.
And somehow,
the cruelest part is this:
in numbness, the world keeps happening without me.
Children laugh, but I don’t hear them.
Light falls on the floor, but it doesn’t warm me.
People love me, but it doesn’t reach me.
Someone says something beautiful and I feel… logical, not alive.
I know I am lucky.
I know I have reasons to smile.
I know I have good things.
I know all of this.
I check them off mentally, like a list.
But my body signs nowhere.
My body is in a room with artificial light,
where everything is too close and too far at the same time.
Numbness is not the absence of emotion.
It is the body’s refusal to deliver emotion anymore,
because it has learned they hurt me far too much.
It’s protection, not punishment.
It’s a shield, not failure.
It’s the way my psyche tells me:
“This is all I can carry today. More would shatter you.”
But numbness is treacherous too.
Because while it saves my life in the moment,
it steals my appetite for it in the long run.
It steals my intensity, my ecstasy, my vulnerability.
It steals my tears and my dancing.
It steals my daring.
And leaves me in a kind of emotional vegetation
where nothing is bad,
but nothing is truly good either.
And sometimes,
when it hurts too much to feel,
numbness becomes the most comfortable place in the world.
But it is not my home.
It is only the waiting room.
It is the prelude to a return.
And I know
that inside me there is a woman who wants her life back.
So much that sometimes she looks for it in excess.
So intensely that sometimes it hurts just to think of it.
But numbness is not the end of the road.
The fact that I begin to see it, paradoxically even feel it, is a sign that somewhere inside, something is preparing to wake up.
And true awakenings usually come
after the longest periods of emotional sleep.
Coming out of numbness is not sudden.
It’s not like turning on a light or lifting a curtain.
It’s more like snow melting slowly under shy rays of sun.
It drips, drop by drop, until I feel again how the ground is soft beneath my feet.
At first I feel only a part of myself: a hand, a finger, a vibration in my chest.
Then, slowly, the heart begins to tremble again.
At first there is fear that if I feel, I will explode.
Fear of the pain that might come all at once, like a wave pulling me back into the depths.
Only the pain does not come alone anymore.
It begins to arrive together with the hunger for life, with the longing for myself.
Numbness did not save me. It only protected me temporarily.
I am ready for my whole spring. For all my seasons.
And it is time to return to life, with all my fragments: the child, the adult, the desires, the shame, the appetite, the crying and the laughter.
Coming out of numbness begins with permission to feel.
Permission to see my light and my darkness at the same time.
Permission to fail, to collapse, to disappoint, to seek comfort without guilt.
Permission to be whole and contradictory.
When numbness melts, I begin to feel the sensations of my body again: the heart beating too hard, the stomach twisting, the throat that knows my emotions.
I begin to feel intensely the cold and the warmth, the sounds and the silence, the hunger and the thirst.
And I know I will not destroy myself by feeling.
On the contrary: I begin to find myself again.
Coming out of numbness does not mean I will never fall again.
It does not mean I will not tremble, that I will not seek comfort in uncertain gestures.
It means I will begin to hear myself, to see myself, to recognize my true hunger for life.
And once I begin to feel, everything changes:
crying is no longer terror, laughter is no longer guilt, desire is no longer punishment.
There is raw life in me, for me.