You can spend so much time holding yourself together that you stop noticing what is happening inside you.
By Lillian Okenwa
Someone asks how your day went.
You open your mouth and realise you have nothing to say.
It was not a terrible day. Nothing dramatic happened. You went where you needed to go, did your work, returned calls, answered messages and dealt with the ordinary demands of life. You may even have laughed at something.
Still, when the question comes, you cannot find the answer.
You are not sure whether you are tired or unhappy. You cannot tell if you are disappointed about something or simply in need of rest. There may be a heaviness you cannot explain, but even that feels too vague to call sadness.
So you say, “I’m fine.”
And perhaps you are.
Perhaps you are also not.
There are seasons when life asks so much of us that there is little time left to notice what it is taking in return. Something happens and you deal with it. Another problem comes and you deal with that too. There is always another phone call, another bill, another responsibility, another person who needs something from you.
You keep going.
That ability can carry you through difficult periods. It helps you show up when circumstances are demanding more than you think you have to give.
But there can come a point when functioning becomes almost automatic. You know how to get through a day. You are less certain about how you actually feel about the life you are living.
This can be particularly difficult for people who have spent years being dependable. They are often the ones others call when something goes wrong. They remember birthdays, meet deadlines, organise things, listen to problems and find solutions.
They know how to handle things.
They may not know what to do when they are the ones who are struggling.
Sometimes they do not even recognise it.
They become impatient over small things. They lose interest in things they once enjoyed. They sit in front of the television without following the programme. They scroll through their phones without really reading anything. They sleep, but wake up feeling as though they have been awake all night.
Then someone asks what is wrong.
“I don’t know.”
It can be an honest answer.
We sometimes imagine that emotional pain announces itself clearly. We expect tears, anger, sleepless nights or some unmistakable sign that something is wrong. But a person can be hurting and still be remarkably functional.
There are people who have carried disappointment for so long that they no longer experience it as a particular event. It has become part of the background.
There are people who have swallowed anger for so long that they only recognise it when something insignificant suddenly pushes them over the edge.
There are people who call themselves independent when what they really know is how to cope without asking anyone for help.
And there are people who have become so practised at saying, “It doesn’t matter,” that they have forgotten to ask themselves whether it actually does.
Not every change in mood means there is a hidden wound behind it. Sometimes a person really is tired. Sometimes a difficult day is simply a difficult day.
But there are times when the inability to say what we feel is worth paying attention to.
Especially when it lasts.
Maybe you have noticed that you are no longer excited about things that once mattered to you. Maybe you find yourself avoiding people without knowing why. Maybe you have become unusually detached from situations that should ordinarily move you.
Or perhaps everything seems to irritate you.
Sometimes the feeling is there. We have simply given it the wrong name.
We call grief tiredness.
We call resentment stress.
We call loneliness busyness.
We call fear caution.
We call emotional distance maturity.
Finding the right name does not solve everything. But it can make the feeling less mysterious.
Perhaps that is one of the gentlest ways back to ourselves: paying attention without immediately trying to fix what we find.
At the end of the day, it might be enough to admit one thing.
That conversation bothered me.
I am more disappointed than I thought.
I miss the person I used to be around them.
I am angry about what happened.
I have been pretending this does not hurt.
I really do need help.
There is no requirement to produce a profound explanation afterwards.
Sometimes we simply need to admit what is true.
This can be difficult for people who have spent years making room for everybody else’s feelings. They can recognise distress in a child’s face, hear the strain in a friend’s voice and know when someone needs encouragement. Yet when their own emotions arrive, they have no vocabulary for them.
They have spent so much time attending to the outside world that their inner world has become unfamiliar.
Reconnecting with it does not have to be dramatic. It may mean sitting quietly long enough to realise that the irritation you have been carrying all week is actually hurt. It may mean admitting that you are disappointed rather than insisting that you do not care.
It may mean telling someone you trust, “I don’t quite know what is happening with me at the moment.”
That sentence leaves room for honesty without demanding an immediate solution.
We are capable of holding more than one truth at a time.
You can love someone and still be angry with them.
You can be grateful for your life and still wish some parts of it were different.
You can forgive someone and still remember what happened.
You can be proud of how far you have come and still mourn what you lost along the way.
The goal is not to understand every emotion perfectly. It is simply worth noticing when you have become so disconnected from yourself that “I don’t know” is the only answer you have left.
If that has happened, be patient with yourself.
You do not have to explain everything at once.
Start by listening.
There may be sadness underneath the tiredness. There may be anger beneath the indifference. There may be fear beneath the need to control everything. There may also be joy that you have been too distracted to notice.
Give yourself enough room to find out.
A life can look perfectly ordinary from the outside while the person living it is slowly losing touch with what is happening within.
Sometimes the way back is very simple.
You stop.
You pay attention.
And when someone asks, “How are you?” you give yourself permission to find a more honest answer than “I’m fine.”
A lawyer and equity advocate, Lillian is the publisher of Law & Society Magazine. She can be reached at Lillianokenwa@gmail.com, on X: @OkenwaLillian.
