When "I Don't Know How I Feel" Is the Most Honest Thing You've Ever Said

Something Is There – You Just Can't Reach It

There are moments in life when you are supposed to feel something.

A farewell that lingered for too long. An achievement that came after years of hard work. A conversation that ended in a way you didn't see coming. A place you left knowing something had changed – though you were not sure about anything particular. Situations that, by every measure, should come with a feeling – identifiable, clear and definable.

Sometimes, they do. And sometimes, after those situations, you find yourself in an unusual silence. Not peace. Not emptiness. Just – silence that stands in place of a feeling. Like entering a room and sensing someone was just there, but finding it empty. You try to sit with it. Wait for the feeling to introduce itself, giving it enough time and enough space for that. You hope that sooner or later it would emerge and reveal itself.

However, it does not happen in such an elegant way.

You know something happened. You can sense the shape of it; like a word sitting right on the tip of your tongue. It exists. You know that for sure. But as much as you try to grab it, it slips through your hands like water. And so you leave. Taking the nameless feeling along with you, not because you have come to terms with it, but simply because you have no other choice.

The most important things are the hardest to say, because words diminish them — Stephen King

You Watch Other People Feel

You can tell that most of all when you are surrounded by people.

Somebody gets emotional listening to the song and you ask yourself what it feels like – having something penetrate you deeply and get you. Some people describe their feelings with such precision and ease, and you find yourself genuinely wondering, how do they just know? Why do the emotion and the name for it come in the same time, at the same moment, as if they were not separate from each other at all.

Because for you, this never happened.

You feel something – that is definite for sure. There is always something going on under the surface. The tightness in your chest you bring into some conversations. The heaviness which covers some days of yours, though there is no reason for it or at least no obvious one. Restlessness you feel even when everything is fine. Carl Jung once said that "Emotions are Contagious", yet somehow, even your own move through you without leaving a trace you can follow back.

Your body knows. It takes everything, feels everything and reacts to everything. It just sometimes fails to translate the message to you in a language you can understand.

The Conversations That Exhaust You Most

It becomes obvious when someone close to you asks you about your feelings. When the person truly cares and asks in an honest manner: "How are you?" And you try to answer honestly and sincerely. In order to tell them something really sincere, something that is not just words but is an actual reflection of your feelings, your inner world. So you hesitate. You try to look inside yourself to find something solid and give it to that person.

But what do you find during your internal search? There is something, but not very much and definitely no names attached to it. There is no clear thing which you could describe in words and say it clearly. So you know what to do. You give the approximate description of your feelings – something not quite true, but close enough to the truth. Or you tell them what you think and not what you feel, because you can always think and analyze and observe and be logical.

And the conversation continues and the person is satisfied. They stop asking questions and you keep carrying this unnamed thing further into your, hoping that someday the feeling and the words for it will simply arrive together. But they never do.

The truth is that you are not trying to hide anything from anyone. The thing is that you have already been searching before anyone asked you. And most of the time this search comes back empty.

The longest journey you will ever take is the eighteen inches from your head to your heart — Andrew Bennett

There Is a Name For This

At some point, you may have wondered if something was wrong with you.

Not in a dramatic way. Not in a way you said out loud to anyone. Just a quiet, persistent wondering that followed you into certain moments — the ones where everyone around you seemed to feel freely and openly, and you stood there reaching for something you couldn't quite find. You started to believe that maybe this was simply who you were. That feelings came naturally to other people, and for you, for whatever reason, they didn't.

That belief was never fair to you.

There is a word for what you've been experiencing. Psychology calls it alexithymia — and before your mind goes somewhere dramatic, it is not a condition that defines you or limits you. It is simply a name. A name for the experience of having feelings that resist being identified, that exist beneath the surface without ever fully translating themselves into something you can hold, examine, or describe.

What matters about that word isn't the definition. It's what the definition means for you personally — that this experience you've been carrying, sometimes for years, is real. It is recognized. Other people know this silence you're describing. Other people have stood in that same fog, reached for the same unreachable thing, and wondered the same quiet wondering.

You were never broken. You were never emotionally absent. You were just living at a distance from yourself that you didn't choose and didn't fully understand.

And knowing that changes something, even if it doesn't change everything.

The wound is the place where the light enters you - Rumi

What Nobody Tells You

This is what it's like to carry around feelings that are nameless and untouchable; it's a certain kind of lonely, and it's hard to describe it to people who haven't felt it before.

It isn't the kind of lonely that stems from isolation. You can be surrounded by people who love you and still feel it. It is the lonely feeling of being unable to fully satisfy yourself; of trying to reach out and touch the depths of your soul and coming up short. It's the feeling of sitting in a crowded room of people feeling something, while your feelings lurk somewhere behind you and won't introduce themselves.

And when you can't name what you're feeling, sometimes you aren't even sure that you're feeling anything. You wonder if somehow you lack something that other people have; some kind of emotional capability that you missed out on. You see how effortlessly other people inhabit their emotions and wonder if you are that person standing on the outside of the room everyone else is in.

But this is what no one ever tells you:

The nameless feelings that you carry aren't a lack of emotion; they are a depth that hasn't been expressed yet. All of those feelings are there, beneath everything that you do, that you say, and that you choose. They come through in the things that you love, the people that you feel safe with, the moments that cause you to suddenly be silent for no reason. Those emotions are yours; they are just looking for a voice you haven't found yet.

And when someone asks you how you feel, and you pause, and you try, and come up empty handed; and you tell them the only thing that is true right then and there:

"I don't know how I feel."

This is not a failure. This is not a way of avoiding an uncomfortable question; it is, in fact, the most honest thing you've ever said. Because you aren't pretending to have something that you don't, or giving them a convenient answer in order to further the conversation. You are telling the truth about yourself in the only way you know how.

And it takes more courage than most people will ever understand.

Unexpressed emotions will never die. They are buried alive and will come forth later in uglier ways — Sigmund Freud

It Doesn't Have to Be Resolved Tonight

And this is not the place where all the pieces come together.

For it does not end here, nor should it. For it will not fade away because you finally found the right word for it, because you were told that what you were experiencing is valid, or even because you read something that made you feel less alone for a while.

And that's okay.

What matters is this – you stop viewing "I don't know" as a deficiency. You stop considering it a flaw in your character. You stop viewing it as emotional immaturity. You start accepting "I don't know" as the truth, as the honest state that should be treated with the same amount of respect and understanding as any other emotion.

Your feelings will reach the surface sooner or later. On their own time, without any pushing or forcing. Without having to punish yourself for not being ready for the feelings to emerge whenever the need arises.

There is no need for you to have the words yet.

There is just no need for you to pretend that you do.

And perhaps – just perhaps – this is how it starts. Not when you finally find out what it is you have been feeling all this time. But when you realize you can stop being scared of not knowing it.

You don't have to be positive all the time. It's perfectly okay to feel sad, angry, annoyed, frustrated, scared, or anxious. Having feelings doesn't make you a negative person. It makes you human — Lori Deschene