Why am I crying?

Alexithymia. What a bastard.

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Nobody told me that I am anxious

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, alexithymia is the ‘inability to recognise or describe one’s own emotions.’

Hilariously, and slightly tragically, I never knew that I experience alexithymia until I discovered my neurodivergence in my late twenties.

Until I was 29, I had not realised that I can’t really tell you how I feel most of the time.

I have never been able to properly identify or express my own emotions, until my body in some way betrays it.

This includes things like:

• Feeling indifferent about an upcoming event and someone tells me ‘You look really anxious.’ The face gives it away, but nobody thought to tell my brain (though I wonder why my stomach feels sickly and my muscles are tense).

• Regularly noticing that I do in fact feel happy and excited about positive things that have happened to me…but only days or weeks after they have happened.

• Feeling literally nothing, blank, numb, when something negative happens. There’s nothing, there’s nothing, there’s nothing then all of a sudden I find myself sobbing uncontrollably.

• Sometimes I know I’m feeling an intense emotion, because I can feel it in my body, but I don’t know what the emotion is.

It’s almost like I’m the last to know how I’m feeling.

I often wonder how I could have got through nearly three decades of living without realising that I can’t recognise my own emotions very well.

I never knew it was unusual because I never told anyone about it. I never told anyone about it because I didn’t know it was unusual. So I went around believing everyone processes emotions the way I do (i.e on a massive delay).

Many a time I have cried and not understood why tears were streaming. I have felt my face get hot and the sweat start to form at the back of my neck, but the words to describe my emotions would not show up.

To me, alexithymia feels like my brain and body are not on speaking terms.

I know what should, on a logical level, make me happy or sad, but often I can’t articulate it. There are definitely situations where in the moment I am overwhelmed with sensory input and information overload, to the point where emotions are simply not a priority for my brain’s limited on-the-spot processing power.

I can feel the internal bodily sensations that emotions can bring, and I can identify how specific sensations suggest specific emotions, such as how a sickly stomach could be a manifestation of anxiety.

Yet I have a hard time computing all of that at the same time instantaneously, leaving me in a state of ambivalence, until something tips me over the edge and pushes me to an extreme. Hence the crying, or, and I’ve only recently noticed I do this, the hand flapping.

Now that I know I experience alexithymia, I am trying to be more aware of it. I try my best to deliberately give myself time to process things that have happened, and consider how they make me feel.

This has already helped me recently. I have started to set aside time to consider how I feel about things happening in my life. That isn’t to say that I am allowing myself to ruminate, but rather I am giving myself the time and space to think clearly. This is helping me to access and identify emotions I feel.

Writing it out helps. Seeing my thought process on a page means I can go back and join all the dots up. Sometimes it leads to those ‘a-ha’ moments, not just in terms of the emotions I feel about something, but sometimes I can revisit a situation through writing and see in plain English that what happened was absolutely not the way I perceived it at the time. There was a subtext I could not process in the moment, but writing it out uncovered it and I can now see it clearly.

Like everything tied to my neurodivergence, I am grateful that although I didn’t know about it for a long time, at least I know now. I’ll probably write about this more in the future. I would love to know if any of my readers experience anything similar.

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Take it easy,

Ren

PS. If you enjoyed this post you might enjoy these:

Mindfulness for Busy Brains

Echolalia: Sounds Worth Repeating

The Colour of Music