I wanted to know your thoughts on this and if any of you could relate. I’m not saying I’m correct for a fact but I’m trying here, so please give me grace.
There’s something I’ve been trying to understand about myself for a long time, and I finally think I have better words for it.
It’s not exactly depression, loneliness, or feeling like I’m missing one specific thing. It feels more like I’m aware of a whole kind of experience that I don’t seem to naturally have access to.
I can hear people describe love, heartbreak, longing, passion, awe, grief, or even just how deeply certain things mean something to them, and I can understand what they’re describing intellectually. Sometimes I can even feel something when I listen to music or immerse myself in an idea. But there’s often this strange realization of, “People actually experience things like this from the inside?”
What gets to me is that these experiences seem to have a significance that doesn’t have to be consciously constructed. Someone falls in love, gets their heart broken, sees something beautiful, and it can just matter to them on this enormous level. They can turn it into music, poetry, art, memories, entire stories about their lives. Millions of people can relate to those things even though everyone’s experience is different.
And sometimes I feel like if nobody had ever shown me those expressions of human experience, I wouldn’t have spontaneously known to imagine that life could feel that way. I can recognize the experience when someone else gives me a map to it, but I don’t always seem to have the map inside myself. So part of what I’ve been calling a “missing thing” may actually be a feeling that I’m missing out on a way of experiencing existence itself, not necessarily missing a person, relationship, or specific emotion.
I also think there’s another layer to it: I sometimes wonder if I’m mourning a potential version of myself who might have developed differently. A version of me who might have had more emotional awareness, more access to my feelings, more spontaneity, more ability to simply experience things instead of constantly having to analyze them.
So it feels like I’m grieving something I never literally had.
I don’t necessarily mean that I think there’s one perfect “true version” of me that I was supposed to become. It’s more like mourning the range of possibilities I might have had.
And I think that’s why things like music, poetry, romance, aesthetics, and beauty affect me so much. Sometimes they give me a glimpse of the kind of emotional depth or aliveness I’m trying to understand. The hardest part is that I still don’t know exactly what the thing itself is. I can recognize its absence much more easily than I can describe its contents.
That’s probably the closest I’ve gotten to explaining it. I’m unsure if a lot of people also experience this but it’s just been so difficult to put into words that it hasn’t quite been done with this level of recognition, or if this is just genuinely a unique experience of mine… Have any of you felt/experienced this before?
There’s something I’ve been trying to understand about myself for a long time, and I finally think I have better words for it.
It’s not exactly depression, loneliness, or feeling like I’m missing one specific thing. It feels more like I’m aware of a whole kind of experience that I don’t seem to naturally have access to.
I can hear people describe love, heartbreak, longing, passion, awe, grief, or even just how deeply certain things mean something to them, and I can understand what they’re describing intellectually. Sometimes I can even feel something when I listen to music or immerse myself in an idea. But there’s often this strange realization of, “People actually experience things like this from the inside?”
What gets to me is that these experiences seem to have a significance that doesn’t have to be consciously constructed. Someone falls in love, gets their heart broken, sees something beautiful, and it can just *matter* to them on this enormous level. They can turn it into music, poetry, art, memories, entire stories about their lives. Millions of people can relate to those things even though everyone’s experience is different.
And sometimes I feel like if nobody had ever shown me those expressions of human experience, I wouldn’t have spontaneously known to imagine that life could feel that way. I can recognize the experience when someone else gives me a map to it, but I don’t always seem to have the map inside myself. So part of what I’ve been calling a “missing thing” may actually be a feeling that I’m missing out on a way of experiencing existence itself, not necessarily missing a person, relationship, or specific emotion.
I also think there’s another layer to it: I sometimes wonder if I’m mourning a potential version of myself who might have developed differently. A version of me who might have had more emotional awareness, more access to my feelings, more spontaneity, more ability to simply experience things instead of constantly having to analyze them.
So it feels like I’m grieving something I never literally had.
I don’t necessarily mean that I think there’s one perfect “true version” of me that I was supposed to become. It’s more like mourning the range of possibilities I might have had.
And I think that’s why things like music, poetry, romance, aesthetics, and beauty affect me so much. Sometimes they give me a glimpse of the kind of emotional depth or aliveness I’m trying to understand. The hardest part is that I still don’t know exactly what the thing itself is. I can recognize its absence much more easily than I can describe its contents.
That’s probably the closest I’ve gotten to explaining it. I’m unsure if a lot of people also experience this but it’s just been so difficult to put into words that it hasn’t quite been done with this level of recognition, or if this is just genuinely a unique experience of mine… Have any of you felt/experienced this before?
For most of my life, I assumed I experienced emotions the same way everyone else did. Recently I’ve started to realize I might not, like at allllll.
It’s like no matter what I do, I’m always subconsciously analyzing myself, even when I’m alone. Even when I cry, part of me feels like I’m observing myself cry. Not judging it necessarily, just watching it happen and thinking about it while it’s happening.
I’ve started wondering if I experience emotions more as concepts, observations, and analyses than as raw feelings. What’s weird is that I used to feel proud of how self-reflective and emotionally aware I was. I thought I was good at sitting with my emotions because it felt so natural and easy for me.
I even encouraged other people to sit with their feelings because I genuinely thought that’s what I was doing. Now I’m realizing I’ve been doing something entirely different, thinking about my emotions rather than experiencing them the way other people describe.
Now I’m wondering what’s the difference between being self-aware (or even emotionally literate) and being self-analytical…
Can anyone relate to this at all????