For most of my adolescence, I have always searched for the sensation of having something to feel. It made me feel more alive—more human. The devoidness of emotion scared me; it was an innate fear I had hidden under layers of facades that I had forgotten its existence. I was scared of who I was with the absence of emotion. Thus, I developed a hedonistic goal to chase happiness. It gave me a sense of being as if the constancy of pleasure was the end all be all of my life. I chased shallow thrill and laughter, desperate to escape the impending fear that haunted my core.
In my early adolescence, I would spend most of my hours at school and the rest with my friends. I was young, carefree, and ignorant of the complexities of my character. I had only one goal in life, and that was to chase happiness. My brain was wired to find anything that wasn’t happiness or thrilling as something I must escape from. Young as I was, I only ran after instant gratification, distraction after distraction, without considering its consequences. Ignorance was bliss. I could always run away from the consequences of my carelessness, I thought back then. The endless cycle of escapism did not bother me; I was content with it.
This was until the physical restrictions brought about by the pandemic. During this time, I was forced into physical isolation, away from the sources of my life’s meaning and purpose. The fear I had kept hidden for so long began to unravel gradually, and I had no power to stop it. Day by day, I was consumed with everything that was just about anything but happiness that I had constantly run away from. I despised the discomfort that engulfed me. I did not know how to handle it.
I remember it vividly—September of 2020. What I thought would be just one week of being in a slump turned into three years of numbness and fleeting gratification. There was no point of return at this time. I was tired of running after happiness. I let the numbness flow, hoping that it would go away once something big and exciting washed this feeling—or lack thereof—away. But it stayed. And I continued to run from it for as long as I could. I went through various phases in my life. They seemed anecdotal to my friends and to myself, I must admit, but it was my own way of escaping myself. I morphed into different personality archetypes as if I were trying clothes on, hoping that I would know who I really was underneath all my layers.
When all these failed, I found myself stuck in the cycle of retail therapy. As my life grew lackluster by the day, I tried to ease this with the short-term excitement of packages arriving every three days or so. It gave me something to look forward to. But none of it was ever permanent. I would still find myself curling in bed at four in the morning, not knowing what my tears were trickling down for.
Paradoxically, the numbness hurt more than sadness. Having a reason to be sad seemed more straightforward than having my palms burn at ungodly hours for reasons I just could not pinpoint. Thus, after losing hope for happiness to come to me, I began to fill my emotional void with sadness.
I began to nitpick myself; I looked for problem after problem, creating them out of thin air. I treated these as hurdles to overcome, as they gave me a sense of purpose and accomplishment. Peace felt so unsettling that I could not bear the idea of not having something wrong about me that needed to be fixed.
I was a slave to emotional addiction. The lack of a clear identity and self-concept made me an easy victim. Underneath all my emotions, who was I? If I am not happy, then what must I be? If I am not sad, then who am I? If the point of life is to experience a range of emotions, then am I even alive?
All these years, I thought I was running from numbness, but I was just running from myself. I was so scared of who I had kept hidden under layers of facades that I drowned myself in a constant stream of emotions, hoping they would define who I truly was. My identity was attached to fleeting moments, and every so often, I would lose myself in these.
However, we are nuanced beings. Our identities are not constrained to polar ends of a spectrum. We are not defined by our emotions. The terms “emotions” and “feelings” are used interchangeably and are often overlooked as a mere technicality. Emotions are meant to be felt—not forced, not identified with. Life is a river of experiences that come with certain emotions tied to them. We cannot stop a river from flowing; we simply allow it to pass. Analogously, we cannot hold onto certain feelings and force them to be our identities. The whole point of living is to experience, not to grasp or dwell.
Clinging to certain emotions ironically only perpetuates the cycle of numbness. A person who only remains happy will begin to feel numb to the feeling of happiness. It becomes so common that it turns into the bland normalcy of their lives. This is uncannily similar to drug addiction, where bliss becomes the norm, and people begin to crave more than what more already is.
To experience the highs, we must experience the lows. To experience the lows, we must experience the highs. The constancy of riding the high of thrill and excitement rids our lives of nuance. To live, we must simply be. Experiences and emotions are not to be chased after; instead, we must only allow them to wash over us and then let them go. There is so much beauty in the world to experience than what we seem to need to run after. There is so much beauty in evanescence.