This is making me drive crazy and ot feels worse then dying can anyone help me???
Before this all started, I was a very deep, creative thinker. I loved sketching, coming up with engineering ideas (like building robots), and I truly enjoyed the little things in life, like the feeling of the morning sunshine. But during the summer holidays while I was at home, my emotions started fading away very slowly. At first, I didn't fully realize what was happening; I just noticed everything starting to feel flat and hollow.
To try and fill that empty gap, I would overstimulate myself, like watching two phones at the same time. I knew something was wrong, which led me to start searching online for different illnesses. That health anxiety spiraled until I had a panic attack. Luckily, it was only one, and I managed to get control of myself. A doctor prescribed a very low-dose SSRI, but I don't think it really did anything—I was mostly just surviving by holding my thoughts together and fighting the feeling myself.
The month following that panic attack was the worst experience of my life, honestly worse than dying. I had absolutely zero feelings, my mind couldn't grab onto a single thought, and it felt like my brain was physically slipping into a void. It is completely impossible to explain that level of nothingness in words. Over time, the only way I found to cope was to ignore the feeling instead of confronting it. I became about 80% successful at ignoring the void, especially when I was working and distracted, but the emotional flatness never left.
Slowly, after about five to six months, a few negative emotions broke through—I started feeling anger, frustration, and shame. Then, around eight or nine months in, I experienced a tiny breakthrough: I was working in a restaurant, and a very strict chef gave me a compliment. For about 20 to 30 seconds, I felt a genuine burst of little happiness, but then it immediately went completely flat again. I realized I could only feel tiny bits of excitement at very high, extreme levels of stimulation.
Now, because I no longer have a job and am spending more time at home, that terrifying feeling of my mind "slipping into the void" returned about two months ago. When I am alone and doing nothing, that unexplainable nothingness confronts me head-on. Because I don't have any natural emotions to keep my mind genuinely occupied, it feels like my brain desperately tries to grab onto anything just to stay busy. The only way I can distract myself is through extremely high stimulation, but the second the distraction stops, the void is right there. I just don't know what is wrong with me.
Today, my emotions are still entirely flat. I wake up in the morning and feel absolutely nothing. Even when I am actively joking with friends, I am maybe feeling 1% of the emotion I should be feeling. The rest of the time, I just get this weird, unexplainable sinking and dropping sensation in my stomach because my brain recognizes that I am not truly experiencing the joy around me.
I have been mentally fighting and resisting this for a full year. I honestly just want my emotions, my creativity, and my peace back. Can anyone relate to this, can anyone help me with this, and has anyone actually gotten out of it?