It happened again. And it will continue to happen. And I hate it.
That big, heavy feeling in my chest that I can’t describe—it sits there, weighs me down, makes me feel sick, and racks my body with what I assume is anxiety. I try all my usual coping mechanisms:
✔ Exercise? Doesn’t help.
✔ Sticking to a routine like a pro? Nope.
✔ Using timers to complete tasks? Useless.
✔ Talking about it? What would I even say?
I feel lost and overwhelmed.
What is wrong with me?
Then I check the date.
And just like that, I realise the problem. It’s nearing the anniversary of a loss. And this feeling—the thing I’ve been drowning in for days—is grief.
Except… it didn’t feel like grief.
But what is grief supposed to feel like?
I don’t know. I’ve never known. I have Alexithymia, a difficulty identifying emotions.
The Frustration of Not Recognising Your Own Emotions
I’m crying as I write this post, but not from grief. I’m crying with frustration—because my brain forces me to experience physical pain and days of torment just because it can’t do the simple task of naming and recognising an emotion.
I know anger, fear, and love—not because I instinctively feel them, but because I’ve learned to recognise their physical sensations. Even then, I sometimes miss the signals. I might seem like someone who is very in touch with my emotions because I’m explosive, passionate, and reactive. But a lot of the time, that’s an autistic meltdown or my justice sensitivity having a wobble.
When it comes to the bigger, more complex emotions—grief, guilt, loneliness, nostalgia? I haven’t got a clue. Emotional processing in autism is different and it’s something I find difficult and distressing.
Is My Stomach Upset, or Am I Feeling An Emotion? What is Alexithymia?
I spend a ridiculous amount of time trying to work out if I have a stomach ache because of anxiety, stress, sadness, or just something I ate.
- Is my headache from a social interaction I found difficult?
- Do I feel uncomfortable around this person because of a gut instinct or a past experience I don’t remember?
- Am I detached in a crisis because I truly don’t care, or because I simply don’t know how to feel?
I’ve been called a robot before. I’ve had people say I’m “not human” because I’ve reacted to a traumatic event with nothing. No crying. No outward distress. Just silence.
They assume this means I don’t care.
I do care.
I just don’t feel anything. Or, if I do, I don’t understand what I’m feeling.
It’s like my brain has two departments:
- The Emotion Department – generating feelings and sending them off for processing.
- The Processing Department – supposed to read the emotions and label them correctly.
The problem? The email server between these two departments is down.
So while one half of my brain is drowning in emotions, the other half is spinning around in an office chair wondering what’s for dinner and blissfully unaware of the amount of processing requests that are piling up.
Learning to Live With Emotional Blindness.
I’m trying to come to terms with my alexithymia, but it’s so hard.
Over the last couple of years, I’ve managed to shorten my emotional identification time for big emotions. What used to take weeks or months to figure out now only takes a few days. But those days? They still hurt and I still think I am experiencing a physical issue.
The lower-level emotions—the quiet, background ones that creep in slowly? I may never be able to recognise those in the moment. I just have to accept that I’ll always be a step behind my own feelings.
For me, this is one of the most debilitating and frustrating aspects of being autistic. It’s not that I don’t want to identify my emotions—it’s that my brain simply won’t let me.
And if I don’t know I’m feeling something, I can’t process it.
Fucks sake.
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