On numbness, survival, and the truth you already know but haven’t been willing to hear
I numbed it for years.
Wine at 6pm that became wine at 4pm that became wine whenever the silence got too loud. Scrolling until my eyes burned because putting the phone down meant being alone with my own thoughts. Picking fights just to feel something other than the hollow ache sitting in the centre of my chest that I couldn’t name and didn’t want to look at. Cleaning the house like a woman possessed at midnight, reorganising cupboards I’d reorganised the week before, saying yes to every invitation, filling every minute of every day with noise and movement and distraction because if I stopped, even for a second, the thing I was running from would catch me.
And I knew what it was. I always knew.
It was the truth. Sitting right there, patient as hell, waiting for me to stop moving long enough to feel it.
Gabor Maté makes a distinction that changed how I understand everything I did during those years. He separates pain from suffering, and then he separates both from the thing most of us actually live inside, which is the avoidance of pain. Pain is information. It’s the body’s honest signal that something is wrong, that a boundary has been crossed, that you’re living inside conditions your system was never designed to tolerate. Suffering is what happens when we resist that signal. And the avoidance, the numbing, that’s where most of us spend our entire lives. Not in pain. Not even in suffering, exactly. In the enormous, exhausting effort of making sure we never have to feel either one.
The numbness isn’t weakness. It’s one of the most sophisticated survival strategies the human nervous system has. When the truth would require dismantling everything you’ve built your stability on, the body doesn’t wait for your conscious mind to make a decision. It reaches for the nearest available anaesthetic: alcohol, distraction, busyness, another person’s crisis, his phone call at 11pm that you already know the ending of but pick up anyway because at least the chaos displaces the grief. The nervous system isn’t choosing dysfunction. It’s choosing the lesser emergency. It’s brilliant, actually.
It just won’t let you live.
There was a night, and I don’t even remember what triggered it, where I just stopped. I didn’t open the wine. I didn’t pick up the phone. I didn’t turn on the TV or start cleaning or call someone to talk me out of feeling what I was feeling. I sat on the edge of my bed, still in my work clothes, shoes still on, and I let it come.
And it came. Not like a feeling. Like a physical event. Grief that started in my stomach and moved upward until it was in my throat and my chest and behind my eyes all at once. Rage I didn’t know I’d been carrying, the kind that sits so deep in the body it doesn’t feel like anger anymore, it just feels like exhaustion. And underneath all of it, the loneliness. The specific, devastating loneliness of being in a relationship and feeling more alone than you’ve ever felt in your life, because at least when you’re single the absence has a name. When you’re with someone who’s supposed to be your person and the loneliness is worse, there’s no podcast episode that makes it make sense. There’s just the knowing.
And the knowing is the thing you’ve been running from.
I cried until I couldn’t breathe. Until my whole body ached. Until there was nothing left. And then it got quiet. Not the scary kind of quiet I’d been running from. A different kind. Still. The kind that exists on the other side of a storm when everything has been stripped and what remains is just space. Room. Air.
That night on the edge of my bed was the bravest thing I’ve ever done. And I didn’t do a damn thing. I just stopped running.
The courage I’m talking about isn’t the loud kind. It isn’t the Instagram quote kind. It’s the quiet, unglamorous, terrifying kind that happens when no one is watching and there’s no applause and you just decide that tonight you’re not going to anaesthetise yourself out of your own life. From the outside it looks like nothing. A woman sitting on a bed in the dark, still in her work clothes, mascara halfway down her face.
But on the inside it’s everything. It’s the moment you stop abandoning yourself. The moment you decide you’d rather feel this and know it’s real than numb it and keep living in a story you already know isn’t true.
Because your pain has been trying to finish a sentence for months. Maybe years. And the sentence isn’t complicated. It’s the plainest, most unbearable, most world-rearranging truth you already know but haven’t been willing to sit still long enough to hear.
This isn’t okay. And you know it.
The numbness kept you alive. It did its job. But it’s done now.
What comes next requires you to feel.
Choose all,
xoxo Viktoria
P.S. If you’re reading this and thinking “but I don’t even know what I’m numbing,” that’s the numbness working. You know. Your body knows. The half-second every morning before you remember, the one where everything is fine and then the weight lands before your feet touch the floor? That’s the knowing. You don’t need more insight. You need five minutes of silence and the willingness to not fill it. The sentence will finish itself.
