Dannielle Says: 

YOU ARE ME. YOU ARE ME WHEN I WAS YOUNGER. YOU ARE ME. 

DUDE…I used to make up things I felt all the time. I don’t think I legit cried until I was like a Junior in college. I felt like I was going batshit crazy bc I would feel jealousy/anger/happiness/sadness, but it would NEVER happen when everyone else was feeling it, and it would NEVER happen spontaneously. I always had to be like ‘this thing just happened, i dont think i like the fact that that thing happened, i guess i’m sad about it’ … then I would be sad. I literally had to talk myself into feeling things. 

I NEVER would talk about my feelings bc I had nothing to talk about, like, i had friends who would tell me all their deepest feelingest of feelings and I’d be like ‘yea, neat’ … and that was kind of it… You’re not weird or different or awful, you’re just not there yet. I don’t think we all have to feel the most extreme of emotions throughout our entire lives. I think some of us feel it when it’s time to feel it.

The important thing is to just be honest with yourself. We all grow up thinking there is one kind of person we’re supposed to be, and that’s not true. You’re doing an awesome job being you, hell, you’re smart enough to recognize you don’t really feel anything and you’re care enough to try and figure out what that means. Serial killers are the people who don’t feel anything and they’re like ‘hmmm maybe i’ll feel something if I kill someone’ …so i’m glad you didn’t do that… 

Kristin Says:

Feelings are fucking weird, you guys.

It’s like, Dannielle didn’t have feelings at all, and I have feelings for the craziest reasons and rarely for things that should actually provoke feeling.  Por ejemplo, I have had full emotional break-downs because my jean shorts make me look like a big fat square, but when my mom was hooked up to a breathing tube and almost died I didn’t feel anything until months later.

The thing is, you not “feeling” anything does not mean that you don’t have feelings.  Sometimes feelings come out in tears or an ache in your belly, and sometimes they make you grind your teeth while you sleep or have heartburn for months.  Sometimes you don’t know you have feelings until all of a sudden one day you see a leaf fall onto a baby stroller and everything feels funny and you go home and cry for three days without stopping.

You don’t have to feel the same way that anyone else feels.  Stay in communication with yourself, like Dannielle said.  If your best friend says something awful to you and you don’t feel anything immediately, try to take some time with yourself to process what she said, what it meant, and what you think about that…you may literally not care, or, you may care so much that the feeling gets buried under layers of protection because you don’t want to hurt. 

Also, I am not sure how old you are - but I can also say that, generally speaking, my first 22 years were full of feeling no feelings or too many feelings and generally being convinced that I was insane, then I spent my mid-twenties learning about myself, doing stupid things, being angry with myself, and learning about myself some more, and now at 30 I finally feel like I understand a tiny bit of the way I work.  I imagine that we all go on a similar journey, so allow yourself room to grow - but don’t force it.