A friend of mine said the other day "I can't get excited about anything these days" and it really stuck with me, so I wrote up this response.
I've been thinking about this statement a lot, because I relate to it a lot. I really think this is a trauma response. You create walls around your heart so you don't have to feel the pain that the world inflicts on you but at some point the walls are so old and so thick that you can't get through them anymore.
Another way of thinking of it, one of the psych professionals we talked to drew a picture of a house on a whiteboard. She described the walls and the ceiling as the systems of thought and memories and experiences we build into our personality as we age. But at the center of that house, behind everything else, is the inner child. That inner child is the emotional, reactive, fussy version of ourselves that we were when we were little. That inner child carries with them the emotional wounds of childhood and when things happen outside of the house that remind the child of the pain of those wounds, they can react so dramatically that it can be heard outside of the house. These are the times that something will trigger a reaction in you that you weren't expecting, something that from the outside seems completely out of scope with whatever the inital thing was.
So if you put those two things together, you wind up experiencing life as long periods of "meh" punctuated by short bursts of overwhelming anger or sadness, or maybe sometimes something very intense will make its way through and you'll feel something real and powerful. It's survival but it's not really living, not the way we should be living knowing how fleeting life is and how precious every moment is.
The things I would say I think you should know:
-This can and will get better, but it does take some work to make it happen.
-A lot of the stuff to make it better is annoyingly common advice. Take a dumb walk for your dumb mental health. Stay hydrated, Eat better. Blah blah blah
-Therapy is good, journaling is good, talking to people is good. It helps you to think through and express the real wound behind the pain, so you can start to heal
-The things we've done with psychiatric medication are truly incredible and life-changing
-People have a lot of different things that help them get back in touch with themselves, some of mine are art and movies and music.
But the most important thing, speaking not just to you but directly to that kid in that house. To the you at the core of everything else: You are loved. You are accepted. You are safe. You are okay right now and just the way you are. Whatever you can do to feel that, to believe that, will help you to be able to get excited about things again. To feel the world again. Once you can get in touch with that kid at the core of you and just tell them they are safe and loved and okay, you can really get better. It's hard and a lot of times it's painful, but it's work worth doing.
