I Don't Know How To Feel Anymore

 Dissociation leads me to the feeling of emptiness very often. People with BPD experience a chronic feeling of "emptiness", as if something is missing within themselves, a part of their soul is lost, and all you have left is the hollow empty feeling of a shell. This is a common struggle for myself, too, even without dissociation. But dissociation makes it easily ten times worse.

no more tears left to cry.

You feel completely detached from yourself and the world around you. You feel that detachment in your body, but also in your psyche, in your emotions. You feel like whatever it is you're feeling right now is not really your own, and your thoughts feel foreign to you too. It's the complete lack of connection to yourself and this reality, which in turn makes you feel like you're not really a person to begin with – just an empty shell of a human being, pretending to live life and be there for other people. 

During my very intense and long dissociative episodes, I feel all of my emotions flatten to the point of not really being able to identify them. Whatever strong emotions I am usually feeling due to the emotional instability that comes with BPD are suddenly taken away from me, only leaving the emptiness behind. It's a scary feeling and one that can make me extremely suicidal. 

Because it's not like I am not *feeling* anything in that moment – I am, after all, I'm a human being. It is just the lack of *connection* to those feelings that is exacerbated by my dissociation. I can't reach them, I can't detect them. I don't know what I am feeling, but what I do know, is that it is not good.

Crying is my main way of dealing with the psychological pain I am constantly experiencing. Crying gives me relief, takes some of that burden away from me. The tears streaming down my puffed face bring me comfort, an indication of the realness of the pain other people have put me through – that it's not "just in my head", because these tears, these stains, are real. 

But dissociation takes that away from me a lot of the times. That lack of connection to my emotions hinders my ability to detect them, and therefore it makes it nearly impossible for me to cope with them in any way. So even if I wanted to cry, I am literally unable to. I can't force those tears out of my eyes, fake crying does not do the trick for me. 

But the tears of my skin do.

Detached,

ichigonya