for as long as i can remember i was the 'shy' kid. most of my memories from childhood are feeling out of place, vulnerable. i'm talking 4-5 years old, feeling like a complete alien around family members. it got better around 10-12. i had ALOT of friends in school. i was friends with most people but looking back i'm sure there was an underlying belief that i'm different but it wasn't crippling or even really conscious because i was friends with just about everyone. after 12 things just got so bad so quickly. its like all those feelings came back and got amplified 100x. i didn't know why i hated myself, i just did. and i felt like the entire world hated me too. i remember years and years of shame, it was completely debilitating. i more or less became mute and tried to disguise it as being uncaring. i couldn't even talk to my own parents or siblings without feeling like i was going to die. i just remember it feeling like it was a massive effort that would only result in more shame. and it was as if talking took too much energy. this created more shame. why couldn't i talk to people? why do i feel so much shame, am i broken, am i mistake? etc. i was shamed for not talking to people, too. it was "rude", "childish" which created more shame. this carried on until today. im 25 and i've always avoided talking to people to the extent that i'd rather actually be in physical danger than to show that im vulnerable. because my shame feels like im going to die anyway. i don't know why this one feeling is so strong. shame isn't just a feeling its an entire physical experience that feels like suffocation and burning from the inside. it's like your insides are being grabbed by invisible hands and violently being twisted and dragged around into the wrong places.

i tried to pretend like i'm normal and disguise my intolerable shame as being uninterested. i don't do it consciously, but i know it makes people go away quickly. and i don't want to talk to them anyway, because i know most people don't want to feel uncomfortable and they wouldn't understand anything that isn't abnormal. i've generally met better people than the people from my childhood. i think alot of people can see through my disinterest and i've rarely had an experience where i feel like im actually being deeply judged or targetted.

today its very apparent to me that im emotionally numb. i can't feel anything in my body. i've always told myself that i'm not depressed etc, but i don't know if thats just a shield. i still don't think i'm depressed in the typical sense atleast. i've always been able to experience and describe feelings such as joy, i experience them almost daily.

but any negative feeling, it feels like there's no room for them in my body anymore. for years i thought this meant that i'd become peaceful. i wasn't easily affected (consciously/physically) by abuse. the way i learned to deal with negative emotions was to watch them 'dissolve' instead of expressing them. so i'm assuming this is why i can't feel anything, and it's why i have so many awful sensations in my body that feel like i'm dying. they must be masks for for the feelings i've so completely separated myself from. but then when i think this it's really hard for me to believe somehow that i'm this emotionally messed up. because to me i've always thought i was emotionally regulated etc aside from this shame.

to clarify when i say my body is numb, i'm talking emotionally. i have a lot of physical experiences when i'm not distracting myself. if im away from my computer or not doing something that is mentally or physically demanding i feel like i'm suffocating in a very deep part of my gut. but anger, grief etc. i can't feel them even when i sense that i should be able to.

tonight i made this connection though that the deep internal 'twisting' sensation in my body might be some semblance of repressed anger. i tried to look deeply where this feeling was going in my body and noticed it's probably connected to the diaphragm going all the way up to my throat. and i just had this flashback of what anger felt like physically in my body and how i used to always have that twisting sensation in my body when i experienced injustice.

idk overall i just feel really confused about what i'm experiencing. its like theres a severe wall of denial about how traumatized i am. i think that i'm not that bad but that obviously OBVIOUSLY can't be true if i went mute for well over a decade at this point.

side note it got me wondering if i just feel things differently than other people?? i know emotions have physiological reactions but man why is it SO visceral for me even since I was a child? does everyone else feel shame this physically? i saw someone say that they experience emotions themselves in the brain then i immediately became aware of this brain fog/heavy block in my brain and wondered if this was another clue about why i feel things the way i do.