There’s a particular kind of moment that doesn’t show up in the photos.
The kids are asleep. The dishes are done, or they aren’t, it doesn’t matter. You finally have what you’ve been begging the universe for since 6am — quiet, no one needing anything, no one asking what’s for dinner. And you walk out to the porch, or the bathroom, or under the covers in your own bed. Then you just sit there. And you don’t feel anything.
Not bad. Not good. Just nothing. Like someone turned the volume down on the whole thing.
If you’ve been there, you already know what I’m talking about. You don’t need me to draw the picture. You already feel it in your chest reading this, the recognition pulling up before the analysis can.
I lived in that exact moment for the better part of a year on the backend of my life utterly burning down around me (of my own making, but that’s a different post entirely).
The back porch in 2020. The kids on Zoom in the next room. A work call starting in seven minutes. Someone yelling about a math worksheet I genuinely could not understand. (Why has math changed so much? I still don’t know.) And me, somewhere outside my own life, watching myself make breakfast and answer emails and sign permission slips and respond to texts that said you’re amazing, I don’t know how you do it with a thumbs-up emoji. Because the thumbs-up emoji is the universal symbol for I am lying, but politely.
People around me thought I was holding it together. Honestly, I thought I was holding it together. I had a job. I had kids who were fed. I had a house that was mostly clean. By every external metric you’d hand to a woman, I was doing it.
What I actually was though, gone.
But not in a way anyone could see. I wasn’t crying. I wasn’t yelling. I wasn’t falling apart in the way the movies tell you a woman falls apart. I was just… absent from my own life. Functioning, but hollow. Performing, but empty. There was no one home inside the woman doing the doing.
And honestly, the scariest part wasn’t the numbness itself. It was that I’d started to think it was me. Like I’d just become a calmer person. Lower-maintenance. Easygoing. Quite the turnaround from how intense I was in the months leading up to this.
It wasn’t. It was my body doing the only thing it could still do. Which was conserve power. Returning me to a status quo I’d lived in before. Stay small, don’t react, don’t be.
But see, numbness isn’t a personality trait. It isn’t your new baseline. It isn’t proof you’ve finally chilled out. Numbness is what your nervous system does when continuing to run at full capacity would cost more than the system can afford. Your body files the emotions away behind a door it can’t open right now. Because accessing them would kill the machine.
So you go flat. You go quiet. You go on autopilot. You become the woman who shows up for everyone and feels nothing about any of it. And then you stand at the kitchen counter at 10pm trying to remember what you ate for lunch and realize you didn’t.
That woman, the one on the porch, the one in the car, the one staring at the streams of water in the shower, guess what? She’s not broken. She is exactly what a human nervous system looks like when it has carried more than it had capacity for, for longer than it should have.
Because I can’t help myself, which you will soon learn, I want to name something out loud. Mostly because I know how the wellness industry talks about this and I want to be clear that I’m not doing that.
This isn’t going to be a piece that tells you the numbness is here to teach you something. Your shutdown is not a gift. It is not your body’s wisdom whispering ancient truths. It is your body in conservation mode, and conservation mode sucks to live in, and you don’t have to be grateful for it.
What I will tell you is that there’s language for what’s happening, and once you have the language, the math starts to change. You stop wondering what’s wrong with you. You start understanding what’s happening to you. And those two questions live in completely different rooms.
So here’s where I’m going to land this plane, because I’ve been on enough porches in the dark to know that you don’t need a sermon at the end. You need to know what this is.
This Substack is the place where I name the terrain. The numbness, the shutdown, the who am I underneath all this, the part where you keep ending up back in the same internal weather and blaming yourself for it. I’m going to give you the language I didn’t have. The framework I built because nothing existing was honest enough to use. The map I needed and couldn’t find.
I’m not going to make your pain pretty. I’m not going to ask you to thank it. I’m not going to promise you a finish line, because I don’t believe in one, and anyone selling you one is selling you something.
What I will tell you is this. Your body’s been keeping records the whole time. The version of you that put on the costume to survive whatever you survived, she’s still in there. She didn’t go anywhere. She’s been waiting for someone to use her real name.
That’s what we’re doing here.
And one more thing, before we go. The work I do here, the framework, the language, the actual map, that part is always going to be free. I’m not interested in gatekeeping the thing that names you. Anybody who needs this should be able to find it without a credit card. I have a lot of opinions about who profits off women not understanding their own bodies, and I’m not adding myself to that list.
If you want the rest of the orientation, the next four pieces in this series will give it to you...
For now, just know you’re in the right room.
The costume comes off here. The lessons stay. They’re yours to keep.