numbness

You've faced horrors in these past weeks... I don't know which is worse. The terror you feel the first time you witness such things, or the numbness that comes after it starts to become ordinary.

Physical pain was easy. It would always pass in the end. All it needed was time - a ticking clock.

At the time, I remained relatively calm before that spectacle of horrors, which is perhaps the most telling indication of just how desensitized I had become. The more I witnessed such atrocities and rubbed shoulders with death, the more I desired to stay alive, no matter the cost.

Should could no longer feel grief. She was now like a Geiger counter that had been subjected to too much radiation, no longer capable of giving any reaction, noiselessly displaying a reading of zero.

Someone is going to tell you to get use to this. That feeling of being scared and sad. They're going to say it'll be better when you learn to ignore it. Don't listen to them. Hold on to it, remember it... Don't let yourself forget it. It's too easy to lose.-Carl Grimes

You know, I think the people I feel saddest for are the ones who once knew what profoundness was, but who lost or became numb to the sensation of wonder, who felt their emotions floating away and just didn't care. I guess that's what's scariest: not caring about the loss.

Numb the dark and you numb the light.

Ties are straightened and expressions banished.

It was strange how in that moment of tragedy, it had seemed so unreal, like an old-fashioned movie reel playing on a screen for my eyes only. The pain and broken heart were blocked off for a little while, leaving me numb with disbelief. Shock is what Dad called it. But after a while, the cruel reality started to seep into my tissues, and my body became a sponge, just sucking it all up until, finally, there was so much grief inside, I couldn't help feeling it.That's how it happened for me. First, the numbness right after she died, next the agonising pain and then the place I was at now__he land of perpetual depression.

Depression means self-loathing, self-disgust, and the kind of emotional numbness that feels like psychic death.

I wasn't glad that I hadn't died. And I wasn't sad that I hadn't. I wasn't anything.

Dissociation is numbness and nothingness; it is a feeling of being lost; it is floating on a cloud that threatens to suffocate; it is automatic speech and action without awareness or control; it is looking at the world and blinking to try to remove the blurry fog; it is hearing and seeing the immediate world and simultaneously feeling very far away; it is raw fear; it is unfamiliarity in familiar places; it is possession; it is being haunted everyday by unknown monsters that can be felt but not seen (at least not by others); it is looking in the mirror and not knowing who is looking back; it is fantasy and imagination; and, above all else, it is survival. Dissociation is all of these things and none of them at once.

To distort our faces with joy, or wail and weep with sorrow, or collapse in agony, or wallow in sentimentality _ wasn__ an inviolable human trait but something we can lose simply by leading dull and dreary lives. __ rich emotional life,_ she__ written, __s a privilege reserved only for the daring few_.

When our mental functioning is whittling away and our mind becomes a lame duck, perception does not form the context anymore and all connections on the social chessboard are conked out. Only patience and endurance may draw us out of the quagmire of numbness and allow us to tear open the cloudy screen that is hiding our points of __nterest_ and __ttention_, so long as we focus on the __ingular moments_ and the __ppealing details_ in our life. Awareness can help us shape a comprehensive picture for a functional future. ("Lost the global story.")

Pleasure and pain are on the same side of the coin of human experience. The opposite is indifference or numbness.

Oddly, the burned hand didn't seem to hurt much anymore; it was only numb. It would have been better if there had been pain. Pain was at least real.

.."I let people walk away, the one who loved me, the one who cares for me, I push them to their limits but the saddest part is...I felt nothing, too much pain makes me numb..

Some attribute had departed from her, the permanence of which had been essential to keep her a woman. Such is frequently the fate, and such the stern development, of the feminine character and person, when the woman has encountered, and lived through, an experience of peculiar severity. If she be all tenderness, she will die. If she survive, the tenderness will either be crushed out of her, or__nd the outward semblance is the same__rushed so deeply into her heart that it can never show itself more.