An Emotionless Empath

I would consider myself quite an emotional person. For anyone who knows me, that may be a bit of a surprise, however. I feel things very intensely – I love deeply, I hurt deeply, I spend a lot of my time dealing with various emotions and quite often can feel very out of my depth. But whilst I can be quite bad at dealing with my emotions, I can also be quite bad at expressing them and showing them to others.

 It’s something that I wish I could get better at. I have so many friends who I know are always there for me, and so many moments that I know I need to break down and cry with them for a while, yet every time, the tears never come. Things go unsaid, and the world continues on as it had before.

I’ve not always been bad at expressing emotions. When I was younger, I used to be a very expressive person, emotionally and in a whole host of other ways. Yet since then, things have changed. Maybe it was derived from being bullied, maybe from my unknowing battle with my gender for such a long time, maybe it was due to family circumstances that meant I wasn’t the most emotionally expressive person in my two-person household, but something changed that meant that suddenly getting things out is so much harder.

There are moments I want to cry out, to break down and to let everything come out at once, but there’s an invisible wall which prevents it, even when I try.

I think part of it comes from my overthinking nature. Whenever I foresee something coming that’s bound to have some form of emotional impact on me, I start to think about it, puzzle it through in my head and obsess about small details of it, which helps to drain away the emotional response, but not the emotion itself. For example, when I consider leaving a group that’s had such a positive and negative effect on me emotionally for the past two years, I know I should have a visceral, strong reaction to this core part of me ending. Yet, because I’ve known this ending was coming, to the extent of even having an end date for months prior, the emotional reaction has almost been pre-empted.

I know that my hormones are also partly to blame as well. For a girl like me, I have far too much testosterone to be comfortable with, something which I believe reinforces my non-existent emotional responses. One day, hopefully one day soon, this will be a barrier I’ll overcome and hopefully then I’ll be able to be more in touch with my emotions, but until then, I can only dream.

I don’t know how I can start to break down this barrier to my emotions, but I really want to. Whenever I think about trying to break through to my emotions, I can’t help but thinking of that scene from Inside Out 2 – the one where Joy breaks through the tornado in Riley’s mind, revealing a terrified Anxiety at the console but no longer in control, the look on her frightened face when she slowly turns to Joy, the comforting presence that finally lets Anxiety loosen up and be free.

I’m anxious at that console, and I’m counting down the days until Joy, in whatever form she arrives, finally reconnects me with my feelings & lets them all flow freely once again.

Written by, Sophie Layton (she/her)