Inside My Lockdown: Why I’m Here

When I was 13, my parents told me I was too emotional, and it was too difficult for them to deal with. They told me this in the first week of a six-week cross-country road trip. Trapped for over five more weeks in a Dodge Grand Caravan with them and my 15-year-old brother, sleeping together in a pop-up camper, with my bag of Star Trek novels, I turned to something that has now become a nerd cliché (Thank you, Big Bang Theory): I decided that I needed to be a Vulcan. To be able to suppress emotions and only react logically, that was what I wanted more than anything else. I spent much of the rest of the trip sitting silently with my fingertips pressed together in a steeple, fighting to crush anything I felt, anything I wanted to say. I practiced, recalling painful memories that I had previously used to make myself cry on demand, except now I used them to crush and ridicule the emotion out. By the time the trip ended, my parents were no longer impatient with me; I felt like I was living life half-muted, but at least I wasn’t a problem for them anymore. 

Over time, I got even better at it, and I earned the reputation of being calm and able to handle anything; I was “good in a crisis.” This led to some unique opportunities, at least, becoming a bank teller at age 17 and managing a bed and breakfast at 18, because I was “so mature and responsible.”

I thought I had good self-control. I was proud of it. Sure, I had the occasional breakdown in private, a panic attack or two, but as long as I could watch a cathartic movie every few months and sob brokenly for thirty minutes or so, I thought I was ok. That was my life. 

Then 28 years went by. People were born. People died. People got married. People said goodbye. Lots of different people moved to lots of different places. I had jobs. I left jobs. I earned three degrees. I moved to Canada. I became a teacher, again. I got married, became a stepmother, had a child. Through all of that, I was a people-watcher; they fascinate me. I could sit at a park or a mall for hours and just look at people, maybe write about them, but mostly just look. I have always been drawn to strong emotions, but I’m very clinical about it, dispassionate; when I see people experiencing and expressing strong emotions in situ, in the moment, I marvel at it. In fact, I don’t understand it at all. 

I think it was through having a child that I realized I am not normal. I mean, I’ve always known I’m not normal, but this time I realized I am not normal in a way that I didn’t know I was abnormal before this realization. Here it is: I don’t think I’m depressed (this is a topic that will require much more exploration over time, but for now, bear with me). I have assumed for most of my life that I likely have Dysthymia, a chronic form of depression that presents with fewer symptoms and can last for years. But I’m not depressed. I’m numb. At least at this point in my life, I seem to be incapable of experiencing my own emotions, either positive or negative, in the moment that something happens that should elicit an emotional response. When something happens to me that evokes emotions, it is almost an out-of-body experience: I step outside myself emotionally and watch the thing happen. I can even label the emotions in my mental lab report: “I am so angry,” but I may as well say, “I am so pink,” or “I am so covered in freckles,” for all the emotion I feel with it. This allows me to respond to the situation calmly and logically, because I have isolated the emotions and thus taken them out of the equation. 

But the emotions aren’t truly gone. They are muted, crushed, but they linger, putrefying under the surface, poisons building up until I have the chance to privately purge them, bubbling up during times of stress, eating away at my calm. 

Enter the pandemic.

I am never alone.

I cannot breathe.

I cannot cry.

So I always feel like crying.

I cannot scream.

So I always feel like screaming. 

I always feel like raging, crushing, destroying, loving, like everything I should have felt for over a year is churning inside me, needing to be released, needing to be processed, needing to be felt. But I can’t.

I don’t know how. I watch people, watch videos of people crying at the birth of their child, crying at funerals, crying proud happy tears at adorable baby moments beyond counting, yelling at someone who did something hurtful, hugging a friend and telling them how important they are with genuine, unembarrassed emotion, and I marvel at it. And I envy them.

After so many years, I don’t know how to feel. So this is my lockdown. And this is the beginning of my attempt to emerge from it.