Emotionally 'lost'

[TheMildManneredMilitant]

Anyone else just feel a bit emotionally untethered at the moment?

I'm starting to feel like I've been through a trauma but one that is really difficult to define and may not even be over. When I've coped with death and other trauma before I could draw from guidance and other experiences to help me name my emotions and recognise triggers but it's like there's just no reference point to draw on.

Yesterday I saw my dad for the first time in months. Instead of just being happy it was almost like it triggered some kind of grief- even though he is very much alive and there is no reason I couldn't see him every week if I wanted.

I also wonder whether there are many of us who just gritted our teeth and got on with it but who will fall apart once we start to return to normal.

Not sure what I'm after posting here but thought I may not be the only one who is a bit emotionally lost at sea.

With respect Thewiseoneincognito this thread IS us trying to make sense of- and process - our emotions while everything is still uncertain. I've been trying to count my blessings and remain positive for a year and I think all it's done has stopped me from acknowledging and dealing with my own emotions.

weightedblanketlove that is exactly how I feel. When I lost my mum I was just numb for ages and then i started to grieve and process it all. I think its inevitable that I'll go through some version of that now. I thought I was resilient and had somehow escaped this time but I think it's just been some sort of psychological armour that's now starting to crack.

HeronLanyon I'm really sorry for your loss and I like your analogy. I've ventured out to the local countryside away from the streets I've been stuck in for 3 months and I felt that emptiness inside me give just a tiny bit.

to you all and thank you for sharing your stories. I haven't namechecked everyone but I'm reading through and nodding in agreement to pretty much every post.

I can totally relate to this thread. My dh is very keen on socialising, inviting people over to the garden and I have a full on panic attack at the thought of it. I’m worried we’re coming out of lockdown on completely different levels and it’s going to cause conflict.
I feel odd and empty and like I’ve lost myself somewhere along the way. I don’t know how to feel properly happy anymore.
I have a couple of things that help me though, organising walks in nice places with an old friend is very helpful. I find it’s much easier to talk while walking, less pressure to make conversation and being by the sea/in woodlands etc feels better even if you don’t feel like getting out. Sitting in a garden or something, all the is to do is talk so it can feel a bit overwhelming.

Arranging to meet up with kids friends so they can play. Thankfully in Scotland kids under 12 have always been able to meet without social distancing etc. Just watching them play properly and freely the last couple of weeks of school has been amazing, makes me feel better if at least they are happy. Although it also makes me sad that we can’t even take playing for granted anymore and thinking how much the kids have missed out on and still are missing out on. It feels like a whole year of their development/lives has just been lost and can’t come back. Mine are 8 and 10 which I think are great ages that I’m missing getting to do anything fun with them at.

I am also totally incapable of making plans or booking anything more than a few days in advance now and I used to be all about plans and booking holidays. I miss the old me and not sure my brain will ever be the same again.

I’m so glad to have found this thread, it really resonates with how I am feeling now. Sorry to read that so many others are feeling this way. I’m meeting up with my sister and her family today, and we saw them over the weekend, but somehow it makes me feel empty and like I can’t let myself enjoy it. I’m hoping that as things gradually get back to ‘normal’ that we will all start to feel better, but I feel like the ground beneath my feet has moved and will never return

I recently spoke with dp about a gig in November to see if I should book tickets. Even though we both decided not to (saw artist few years ago front row and was a perfect evening and now would be not great seats and all feels speculative) just discussing a normal thing was great. I’m very much the Booker and ‘looker ahead’ and I felt a flicker of the ild ‘HeronLanyon’. Might look at holidays we decide not to go on just yet for the same ‘feels’.
‘Virtual Booking/diary therapy’

I went abroad to an essentially Covid free country a few months ago and it wasn't until then I realised the impact the pandemic had had on me. My first time out in public I came home shaken and sobbed for about 20 minutes. I recoiled the first time I saw my brother and he went to hug me because I wasn't prepared for it. We have absolutely been through a trauma. Our way of life was upturned significantly in a very short space of time and we are still feeling the effects over a year later.

Yes, I feel like I've mentally turned off now. I'm in my 40s and up until a few weeks ago, I had eagerly been watching the vaccinated numbers go up, counting down until my turn, reading the good news threads on here. But with the announcement of the vaccine roll out being stopped, it was just the last straw for me mentally. Like I can't hope anymore because it will be snatched away. I know I will get my turn eventually, but I can't think about it anymore.

I have no desire to meet up with people, talk, socialise, plan for the future. I'm not even sure I want to return to a "normal" life. What I fantasise about is selling our house and moving to a new country for a completely fresh start. New friends, new house, new people.

I'm the same. Just want to cry each day.
No work, nothing to do, turned 60 (oh joy). Cancer scare with DH - two doctors said it was, it turned out not to be.
Teen DD doing pretty well, but I just want to sleep or cry. No energy, no joy in anything. First lockdown was fine, second okay - this one just makes me feel like it will never end. Don't feel we have an opposition party at all, and that unelected scientists are running the show. Really feel utterly hopeless.

@catsjammies every time I see people hug in a film or on tv, my brain screeches 'no too close, too close, move away!!'. Terrifying how indoctrinated we have become isn't it.

I find I'm mostly fine if I just stay close to home, pop to the supermarket and walk the dog, but anything further just freaks me out, it just feels a bit much. My world has become so small, and even now the restrictions are lifting I could make it bigger, I don't find it that appealing, which surely isn't right.

I went for a four hour walk around central london recently - by loads of theatres and restaurants and galleries etc. A quiet early morning. Was like my life flashing before my eyes except everything was shut and partic odd was foyer of royal opera house now full of seating removed for some October distanced performances, menus still up everywhere, hotels boarded up, really odd. Desperate for this all to come back. Returned home mix of deflated and exhilarated. Live very central but my ‘outings’ have been so limited all of this time.
Support all. It will get better. We will look back maybe from a different normal place.

The pandemic has flung me into a bit of a mid life crisis. To be fair though it was brewing for some months (if not longer) before.

Pre pandemic I was passionate about travel and put so much money and energy into my ‘big trip’ every year. Now I feel as though I need to channel that energy into something I’ve wanted to do for years. Moving from the city I’ve lived in all my life. At the end of next month I’ll visit a city I’ve never been to before in the hope that I’ll like it enough to move there. I know nobody there and that’s scary but if I don’t give it a try I’ll always regret it.

Thewiseoneincognito this is a thread for support and empathy. Your comment provides neither, and it is supremely unhelpful to speculate about future lockdowns to people struggling with the current one.

This poster will always find a way onto any thread to spread their unique brand of misery it would appear

HeronLanyon

Brilliant analogy!

TheMildManneredMilitant

Thank you for starting the thread, it's the one I most look forward to catching up on now ☺️

@Piccalino3 your situation sounds very similar to mine. I don't have much in the way of family either and what I do have are spread several hundred miles away. I was doing OK until the talk of family reunions started being bandied about and now I find myself struggling...reminds me what I don't have.

You are very welcome loveisthehope.

It is really helping me so I'm glad it's helping others too.

It's my fave thread at the moment too, I feel less alone and less crazy. Thanks, OP.

I've spent a lot of today in a daze, almost unable to function and got to sleep at 3am last night. I don't know what's up with me but am just waiting for it to pass - perhaps hormones exacerbating existing anxiety.

I also remembered today how much I struggled for a month or two after lockdown number 1, so am trying to go easy on myself.

love is the hope it could have gone further. I read an astonishing book ‘how to read water’ one mind blowing chapter on how South Pacific fishermen could possibly navigate between remote islands. Back in the 1770s Capetian cook could not understand how they did it with no instruments and hundreds of miles from any land. In effect the understanding of water was so unbelievable that hearing the way waves hit the side of the wooden boat could be read and could indicate islands a hundred miles away - just the direction and type of slap of the water. It gets more complicated with island groups and how that affects things !
So my ‘sighting of a bird analogy’ might be I can feel land a long way off but i know it is there. Even in my anchorless drifting state.

It's like as a country we have collective PTSD, in part because of all the gaslighting, changing goalposts, fear-based messaging and stop-start restrictions. I think everyone has just shut down mentally and socially/emotionally, because it's easier. At least it's predictable.

This is spot on for me. What's also made it hard for me is that we have friends and family in places where they've managed this a lot better, where there's been more truth, honesty and certainty in the way they've managed it. Fewer lockdowns, less sense that the government doesn't know what they're doing. Hearing about it is distressing.

One thing I find hard too is that I'm constantly trying to keep it together and be cheery around the kids (goodness knows, they've been through enough) but that means I have no space, nowhere, to express my feelings. DH is barely coping too and his work has become significantly longer hours and more difficult since he's been WFH full-time, so I feel I can't lean on him.

@hennybeans I too really felt despair at the failed continued roll out to under 50s - a hope given and then snatched away, especially bad for me coinciding as it did with the kids going back to (non-socially distanced, non-masked) school. I also fantasise about moving abroad.

Thanks for this thread OP.

Just before the pandemic struck maybe October 2019 I had a weird feeling something big was going to happen. I don’t know why I’ve never experienced anything like this I’m normally very rational. I had recently heard from a long lost, very dear friend and we’d planned to meet up overseas in 2020. I imagined saying to them that we’d meet up when this apocalypse was over. This was months before the pandemic. I wonder about this feeling now. I feel like a big change in my life was due and the pandemic stopped it. So weird.

I’m with you OP and PP. I feel like numb, like I struggle to find joy in, or energy for, anything. It’s the past 3-4 months. Those comparing it to the feelings of bereavement it’s a good analogy. I’ve pushed so many people away just like I did when I lost a parent, through anger and sadness. I don’t feel any sense of hope. I really feel traumatised.

It’s burnout. We are all emotionally exhausted, it’s no surprise we are feeling numb. I really
sympathise. My personality is not what it was.

@RaisinforBeing omg- me too! I had planned a lovely trip for summer 2020 and had this bizarre feeling that it wasn’t going to happen, something was going to go horribly wrong. I wouldn’t let myself get excited about it. Weird!

@TownTalkJewels so weird! Maybe it’s like animals in a tsunami...they can sense something is wrong and go to higher ground? Crazy

@IloveJKRowling I also sympathise with you feeling like you can’t talk about your feelings. I don’t want to bring up covid with family and friends, there’s a sense that it’s such a miserable topic & no one wants to hear about it anymore. My colleagues almost never mention it. The first year, it felt like a valid conversation topic - how we were coping, feeling, etc- now it’s almost as if the expectation is that we just accept our lives & get on with it.

So there is no outlet for my feelings. That’s why I feel so much better after reading these comments and knowing that I’m not alone.

This thread has given me a lot of comfort. Such a help to know I am not alone in how I feel.

I'm 64, and I've had a difficult life, starting with sexual abuse in childhood and ending up with cancer, with so many awful things in between. I've been shielding for a year, due to the cancer I have, and even managed to get a 2nd cancer diagnosis during lockdown last year (a brand new one, nothing to do with the variety I already have). I havent seen my adult kids since February 2020, and I feel completely traumatised by this. We all used to be so close, and I'm terrified that closeness will be lost as we all struggle to find a way through this bastard pandemic.

My DH is due to retire next year (he's been WFH for a year to shield with me), and that was going to be MY time. The time I would finally find who I am and live a proper life, a life to make up for the shit teenage years, and all the awful stuff that came after. But I dont think I will ever feel safe enough now, given my health, to take any risk of catching covid. So there's nothing to look forward to. Ever.

I also had a strangely strong and overwhelming feeling towards the end of 2019 that I was going to be confined to the village I lived in and that the consequences of whatever put us in that situation would leave all of us living in extremely controlled conditions and needing to go back to basics and become more self sufficient. I told my husband at the time as I just couldn’t shake this feeling. Very odd.

Anyway, back to the original OP...yes, I couldn’t agree more. I’m a very sociable person, but can’t bring myself to forward plan anything as I’m now terrified it won’t go ahead, and I’d simply rather have nothing to look forward than have it booked in and risk it being removed. I’ve been invited out in May for dinner and I just can’t comprehend it. I’ve agreed to it, but I feel so nervous. I feel guilty about the thought of going into shops next week.

Sorry to all those who are having a really tough time.