You're Not Dead Inside. You Have Alexithymia.
Why you think you can't feel.
It's always interesting to hear what some people describe as traumatic. An annoying date. A heated argument. A skipped meal.
A friend of mine used to go on about how a professor gave her PTSD. Those were the days I genuinely believed nothing bad had ever happened to me. I got ambushed by crying fits. I had night terrors. No matter how my day went, I was five minutes away from freezing over with rage.
It never occurred to me there was a reason.
Then one day a colleague was describing a feud with her parents as traumatic. I wanted to say, "Sure, but has your mom ever tried to kill you?" Fortunately, I thought better of it. Then my mom died. Somehow, that finally prompted me to start unpacking all the horrible stuff.
If there's one thing I've learned from psychology, and life, it's that going through trauma changes you.
Forever.
We're four years into a pandemic. We're fighting fascism. The planet's ecosystems are collapsing. Before all this, only three or four percent of the population re…