Why Do I Feel Emotionally Numb?

This morning, I sat down to write to you, but I had nothing.

Not sad. Not anxious.

Just blank.

Fifteen letters in fifteen days. I told you about my body at nineteen, diagnosed with something no one could name. The well I kept returning to. The eight people who carried me through the worst year of my life. A content room where I sat alone, running the same loop. Luggage tags at midnight and tearful goodbyes. Monday, the glitter. My younger daughter and her fur baby, Pluto, who will not be at the door when I get home.

Every one of those cost something to write.

And today the tank is empty, so I have nothing to report. I'm mentally exhausted. If I'm feeling this way, you may be as well.

We have been navigating grief, change, anticipation, responsibility, decisions, relationships, work, and a significant transition for the past fourteen days. Over time, our minds reduce emotional processing, resulting in a numb or blank sensation commonly linked to mental and emotional fatigue.

It has hit me more than once in midlife, first during career changes and moving, and now while traveling and becoming an empty nester.

No one warned me about this part. The days when you just feel nothing.

The first few times it happened, I wondered if something was wrong with me. Am I burned out? Am I unhappy? Am I just being lazy? I would look around at everyone else still going and wonder why I couldn't do the same.

Now I know that sometimes I am just emotionally tired. I have felt, carried, processed, and thought about so much that my mind needs a moment to go quiet.

That is why I want to talk about it today.

The question beneath it

So, I sat with the blankness for a while, and I found the question hiding beneath it.

What if I arrive in Santiago and feel nothing?

Thirty-one days. Three hundred and fifty miles. Everything I have prepared for and everything I have spent to get there.

And then I walk into that square, and it is a square with people in it, and I feel exactly what I feel this morning.

Nothing.

Will my journey have meant anything less?

Did any of it matter?

I believe I have this fear because the trip is long and can be overwhelming at times. Arriving in Santiago, ensuring you have the required stamps, getting in line in time to receive the official certificate, and not missing Mass can be challenging. At the same time, wanting to embrace every moment, take pictures, and notice everything around you can be emotionally draining.

That's why I wanted to spend the eighteen days before leaving preparing myself emotionally. Cry, reflect, and get ready to let go of what I can no longer carry: the estrangement, family expectations, the life I imagined before chronic illness, and my attempts to please others at the expense of my own voice. I understand if you don't fully grasp what I mean. I struggle with travel anxiety and am still working to overcome it.

Camino History: what arriving looks like

I have not been there, so everything here is what I have read while preparing, not what I have experienced firsthand.

You enter the Praza do Obradoiro, and the cathedral is in front of you.

There is the Pilgrim's Office, where you present your passport with all the stamps and where the Compostela is issued. On busy arrival days, the queue can be long. Over the past week, there have been as many as four thousand pilgrims completing the journey in a day.

Fun fact: The Compostela and the pilgrim's name are written in Latin.

The Pilgrim's Mass is held at the high altar several times a day, and there is also a Mass in English each morning in the Pilgrim's Office chapel. Check the Camino Chronicles. I have included a complete resource of my research, with links and times.

The botafumeiro, the enormous censer, is not swung at every Mass. According to the Cathedral, it flies on specific feast days throughout the year, and it can also be arranged privately for a fee.

It is a great deal to walk into after a long road, and I imagine it can be overwhelming.

Did You Know

At the start of the Pilgrim's Mass, they read out a list of the pilgrims who came through the Pilgrim's Office in the previous twenty-four hours.

According to the Cathedral's own Pilgrim's Office, that reading gives the number who arrived, along with the starting points of their pilgrimages and where they came from.

Sarria. Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port. Porto. Irun. Seville.

So you sit in a cathedral full of strangers who walked completely different roads, and somebody who does not know you reads out where you began.

And nowhere in that reading is there any mention of how anybody felt when they got there.

The thing pilgrims keep saying

Here is what surprised me most during all my reading.

Not everyone arrives in that square undone.

I have read enough pilgrim accounts describing a flat arrival that I stopped thinking it was unusual. People expected to weep. They expected to be broken open. Instead, they stood there, thinking, is this it?

Some of them say it came later. Two days later, in a cafe. On the plane. Weeks after getting home, in an ordinary moment.

I cannot tell you how common that is, and I am not going to pretend I have counted. I can tell you it comes up often enough that it no longer surprises me, and that the people describing it usually sound like they think they did something wrong.

Yesterday I asked who I would be when I got home. Today the question is smaller and more difficult.

What if the healing does not feel like anything as it is happening?

Maybe something can change you before you even realize it has.

I'm deciding now, two days before I leave, while I'm too empty to argue with myself about it.

Arrival is a fact; feelings are like weather.

The Mass does not specify who cried.

It reads out where you started and where you got to.

I say all this to say that nothing is wrong if you feel just emotionally exhausted at the end of the journey. Take the journey for what it offers you. It's your Camino.

It is okay to just be

I am not going to do a study today.

No word origins. No verse to sit with. No five questions to work through.

If you are reading this and feel nothing, the last thing you need is homework.

So instead, I want to say a few things to you plainly.

You do not have to manufacture a feeling to be okay.

You don't have to feel inspired today, feel grateful, discover a lesson, or turn it into something helpful. Feeling numb today doesn't fully reflect how you're really doing.

I want to be careful here because I know who reads these letters, and I can only tell you about mine. I know where mine came from. I have poured out a great deal over the past fifteen days. Today I am empty, and I expect to be writing to you again tomorrow and the day after.

That is my situation. It may not be yours.

I have learned that even silence has its own way of speaking. Sometimes it tells you that you are tired. Sometimes it tells you that something needs more help than I can give here.

There is a verse I keep close for days like this.

Romans 8 says that if we do not know what to pray for, the Spirit intercedes for us with wordless groans.

When you have no words, the Spirit is still interceding for you.

That is the whole thing. You do not have to produce anything.

My favorite verses when I feel uncertain

Not to study. Just to read.

• The Lord is close to the brokenhearted. Psalm 34:18
• His mercies are new every morning. Lamentations 3:22-23
• Come to me, all you who are weary. Matthew 11:28
• Be still. Psalm 46:10

Read whichever one your eyes land on and then close the book.

That counts.

Reflection

Only if you want to. There is no assignment today.

1. Have I been treating numbness as proof that something is wrong with me?
2. What have I poured out lately, and have I let myself be empty about it?
3. What is true about this season, regardless of how I feel about it today?

Prayer

Camino Challenge: Low Demand

These are the things I actually do on a day like this. Not to make myself feel something. Just to take care of myself while I am here.

Pick one. Not all of them.

• Name exactly what is true. I feel blank. I cannot access what I feel. I know something happened, and I cannot feel it right now. Say the accurate thing rather than the acceptable one.
• Ground physically. Feet flat on the floor. A slow walk. A shower. Stretching. Sitting outside. Holding something warm or something cold.
• Check the basics. Have you eaten? Have you had water? Have you slept? Has anything changed with your medication? Are you simply exhausted?
• Write facts before feelings. This happened. Then this happened. Right now, I feel nothing. Sometimes the emotion shows up later, once the facts are on the page.
• Ask a sensory question instead of an emotional one. Not how do I feel, which you cannot answer today. What do I notice in my body? Tight chest. Heavy limbs. Headache. Restlessness. Nothing at all. Any of those is a real answer.
• Do not draw conclusions from the blankness. You do not have to decide what it means while you are still standing in it.

That last one is the one I must remind myself of most.

An empty day isn't the best time to make any lasting decisions.

If you are looking for a simple reset, I'd call it a low-input hour:

• Stop making decisions. Put down the work, planning, texts, social media, and anything that requires an answer.
• Change your physical environment. Go outside, sit somewhere quiet, take a slow walk, shower, or simply move to another room.
• Give your brain less stimulation. No scrolling, podcast, news, multitasking, or trying to use the hour productively.
• Do one regulating physical thing. Drink water, eat something nourishing, stretch, breathe slowly, or walk without a destination.
• Externalize what is circling. Write everything occupying your brain on paper. Do not organize or solve it. Get it out of working memory.
• Choose only the next thing. At the end of the hour ask, "What actually needs me today?" Pick one thing. Everything else can wait.

Tomorrow We'll Walk...

Two days.

Tomorrow I want to talk about what happens when you step outside the life you know on purpose.

Not because something forced you. Because you chose it, and it is uncomfortable, and it is where almost everything real has ever happened to me.

If today is a blank one for you too, you can just say so. Write me back below. I read every one.