When feeling nothing starts to feel normal.

It does not arrive all at once. You do not wake up one day feeling nothing. It is slower than that.

First the harder emotions flatten. The grief gets manageable, which feels like progress. The anger stops surfacing. The anxiety quiets.

Then the easier ones. Things that used to make you laugh feel mildly amusing at best. The anticipation for things you used to enjoy becomes difficult to locate. Rest does not restore you. Pleasure does not land the way it used to.

At some point, the absence of feeling becomes the baseline. It starts to feel like stability. It feels, in a strange way, like being okay.

It is not okay. Numbness is what the system does when it has been running too long on too little. It is not peace. It is exhaustion wearing the mask of peace.

The feeling will come back. But it needs something different than what got you here.