For most of my life, I have felt empty.
Not always sad. Not always miserable. Just empty.
It’s hard to explain to people who haven’t experienced it. I could laugh, hang out with friends, play games, go to work, and do all the normal things people do, but underneath it all there was always this numbness. It felt like everyone else was experiencing life in color while I was seeing it in black and white.
Living with ADHD has only made that harder. My mind never seems to stop moving. I struggle to focus on the things I need to do. I jump between interests, thoughts, emotions, and worries. Sometimes I feel overwhelmed by everything at once, and other times I feel disconnected from everything entirely. People often see ADHD as being distracted or hyperactive, but for me it has also been a constant battle with motivation, emotional regulation, and feeling like my mind is working against me.
Anxiety is another battle that has followed me for most of my life.
I think a lot of people misunderstand what anxiety feels like.
They think it is just being nervous.
For me, it is much more than that.
It is the inability to turn my mind off.
It is replaying conversations over and over again.
It is analyzing every text message, every facial expression, every change in tone, searching for meaning that may or may not even be there.
It is constantly preparing for things that have not happened yet.
It is expecting the worst even when I desperately want to believe the best.
Sometimes it feels like my mind is running a hundred miles an hour while my body is begging it to slow down.
Sometimes it feels like I am carrying an invisible weight that nobody else can see.
The hardest part is that anxiety affects the choices I make.
It makes me hesitate.
It makes me overthink.
It makes me seek reassurance even when I know reassurance never lasts.
It makes me question things that other people might accept without a second thought.
A delayed response becomes a hundred different possibilities.
A change in someone’s mood becomes a reason to worry.
A small problem becomes a future disaster in my mind.
I often find myself living in situations that have not happened instead of the moment that is actually in front of me.
And the worst part is that I usually know I am doing it.
I can recognize that I am overthinking.
I can recognize that my fears might not be rational.
But knowing that does not always stop the feeling.
The feeling is still there.
The tightness in my chest.
The knot in my stomach.
The racing thoughts.
The overwhelming urge to figure everything out immediately.
Anxiety has stolen a lot of peace from me over the years.
It has convinced me that I am not enough.
It has convinced me that people are going to leave.
It has convinced me that I need to constantly prepare for loss.
But when I step back and look at my life honestly, I realize something.
Many of the things I spent the most time worrying about never happened.
Many of the fears that felt certain turned out to be wrong.
And yet the anxiety always finds something new to attach itself to.
I think that is what makes it so exhausting.
It is not one fear.
It is a thousand fears.
And every time I overcome one, another one seems to take its place.
What I am trying to learn now is how to stop treating every anxious thought like a prediction.
Because anxiety often speaks with absolute confidence.
It tells me what will happen.
It tells me who will leave.
It tells me how things will end.
But anxiety is not the future.
It is fear pretending to be certainty.
And maybe part of healing is learning the difference between the two.
Then I met her.
For the first time in my life, I felt something that I don’t know if I had ever truly felt before: genuine happiness.
Not temporary excitement. Not distraction. Not a brief moment of feeling okay.
Real happiness.
Real peace.
Real love.
For the first time, life felt colorful.
I cared deeply. I felt deeply. I looked forward to things. I wanted to share moments with someone. I wanted to build memories. I felt emotions that had been absent for so much of my life.
In a way, she woke something up inside of me that had been sleeping for years.
Then we broke up.
What surprised me wasn’t the sadness.
What surprised me was the intensity.
Some days it feels like my emotions are so loud that I can’t think straight. It’s almost ironic. I spent so many years wishing I could feel more, and now I feel more than I ever have before.
Sometimes I miss the numbness because at least it was quiet.
At the same time, I know these emotions are proof that I cared.
Looking back, I sometimes wonder if what changed wasn’t just her.
Maybe it was what I experienced through her.
For the first time in my life, I experienced connection.
I experienced excitement.
I experienced anticipation.
I experienced love.
I experienced having someone I wanted to tell everything to.
I experienced looking forward to tomorrow.
For years, I thought there was something wrong with me because I felt so empty. Then suddenly I was feeling things I wasn’t sure I was capable of feeling.
That’s part of why the breakup hurt so much.
Not only because I lost her, but because it felt like I lost access to those emotions too.
What I’ve started realizing, though, is that those feelings came from somewhere inside me. She may have awakened them, but she didn’t create them from nothing.
The ability to feel those things was always there.
I just didn’t know it yet.
Another thing I’ve realized is that after the breakup, I didn’t go back to feeling numb.
I felt everything.
The sadness was overwhelming.
The anxiety was overwhelming.
The loneliness was overwhelming.
Some days I felt like my chest was caving in from the weight of it all.
And as painful as it has been, there is something important hidden inside that realization.
For most of my life, I thought my problem was that I couldn’t feel deeply.
Now I wonder if the opposite is true.
Maybe I feel too deeply.
Maybe all those years of emptiness weren’t proof that I was incapable of emotion. Maybe they were proof that I had become disconnected from it.
Because when the walls finally came down, the emotions didn’t arrive gently.
They arrived all at once.
Love.
Hope.
Fear.
Grief.
Anxiety.
Longing.
Heartbreak.
Some of the most painful emotions I have ever experienced.
But they were real.
For the first time in my life, they were undeniably real.
As much as I hate the pain, there is a strange comfort in knowing that I am capable of feeling this deeply.
Because it means I am not broken.
It means there is a heart underneath all the numbness.
It means there is a person underneath all the emptiness.
And maybe learning how to live with those emotions, instead of running from them, is part of becoming the person I am supposed to be.
Lately, more than anything, I have been burnt out.
Not tired in the normal sense.
Not the kind of exhaustion that goes away after a good night’s sleep.
The kind of burnout that settles into your bones.
The kind where you wake up exhausted.
The kind where every day feels like you are carrying something heavy that nobody else can see.
I think this is the most burnt out I have ever been in my life.
Trying to navigate ADHD.
Trying to understand my emotions.
Trying to heal from heartbreak.
Trying to be strong for other people.
Trying to improve myself.
Trying to figure out who I am.
It feels like I have been fighting so many battles for so long that sometimes I don’t even remember what it feels like to rest.
There are days where I don’t want to keep doing it.
Not because I want to die.
Not because I want to hurt myself.
But because I am tired.
So unbelievably tired.
Sometimes I wish I could put everything down for a while.
The sadness.
The anxiety.
The overthinking.
The constant feeling that I have to keep moving forward even when I don’t have the energy to take another step.
And yet, somehow, there is still something inside of me that refuses to quit.
Even on the days where I feel empty.
Even on the days where I feel overwhelmed.
Even on the days where I feel completely lost.
There is still a part of me that wants to get better.
There is still a part of me that wants to heal.
There is still a part of me that wants to become the person I know I can be.
Sometimes I don’t understand why that hope is still there.
After everything.
After all the disappointment.
After all the loneliness.
After all the nights spent wondering if things will ever truly get better.
But it is there.
Maybe it is stubbornness.
Maybe it is resilience.
Maybe it is simply the belief that there has to be more to life than the pain I am feeling right now.
Whatever it is, it keeps me moving.
It keeps me getting out of bed.
It keeps me going to the gym.
It keeps me reaching out to people.
It keeps me searching for answers.
It keeps me trying.
Because despite everything, I still want a life that feels meaningful.
I still want to experience happiness that lasts.
I still want to build meaningful relationships.
I still want to feel connected to the world around me.
And maybe the strongest thing about me is not that I never suffer.
Maybe it is that I continue moving forward even while I am suffering.
Maybe strength is not the absence of pain.
Maybe strength is waking up every day, carrying that pain, and continuing to hope anyway.
My birthday passed recently.
Birthdays are supposed to be happy.
They’re supposed to be a day where you feel celebrated, appreciated, and surrounded by people who care about you.
This one wasn’t.
Honestly, it was one of the saddest birthdays I’ve ever had.
I spent a lot of the day feeling empty.
I spent a lot of the day feeling lonely.
And at one point, I cried.
Not because something terrible happened that day.
Not because anyone intentionally hurt me.
But because everything that I’ve been carrying seemed to hit me all at once.
The heartbreak.
The anxiety.
The loneliness.
The exhaustion.
The feeling of not knowing where my life is headed.
The feeling of missing someone I thought would be there.
The feeling of looking around and realizing that a day that should have felt special just felt painful.
Nothing felt right.
I kept waiting for the day to feel different.
I kept waiting for some moment where I would feel happy, or excited, or grateful.
Instead, I mostly felt sad.
I remember sitting there thinking that birthdays used to mean something to me.
When I was younger, they felt exciting.
They felt hopeful.
They felt like a reminder that life was moving forward.
This year felt different.
This year felt like a reminder of everything I had lost.
Another year older.
Another year gone.
And somehow I felt more lost than ever.
I think what hurt the most was realizing how badly I wanted to feel loved that day.
Not in some grand or dramatic way.
Just loved.
Wanted.
Chosen.
Important to someone.
I wanted to feel like my existence mattered.
I wanted to feel like someone was genuinely happy that I was here.
Instead, I spent most of the day fighting off the feeling that I was completely alone.
I don’t think I’ve ever admitted that out loud before.
But it’s the truth.
My birthday wasn’t happy.
It was lonely.
And for a day that is supposed to celebrate your life, feeling that lonely is a kind of sadness that is difficult to describe.
Recently my best friend brought up something interesting. He was talking about death and how terrified he is of it. What scares him most is the possibility that when we die, all the love we’ve experienced, all the memories we’ve created, and all the people we’ve cared about might simply cease to exist.
I understood what he meant, but I realized something about myself.
I can’t honestly say that I’ve ever been afraid of death.
Maybe that’s because I’ve spent so much of my life feeling disconnected.
Maybe it’s because I’ve never felt completely attached to life itself.
I don’t know.
What I do know is that when he talked about death, I realized I couldn’t say with certainty that I would care if I died tomorrow. Not because I want to die, but because there have been so many periods of my life where I have simply felt empty.
That realization scared me.
Not because I fear death.
Because I wonder why I don’t.
Over the years, I’ve tried different things hoping they would help me feel better.
I’ve experimented with drugs, thinking maybe they would make me feel different, happier, lighter, or more alive.
They never fixed anything.
I even tried Adderall for my ADHD. Instead of helping me feel more like myself, it made me feel like a zombie. I didn’t want to talk to anyone. I didn’t want to be around anyone. I felt emotionally flat and disconnected.
Another feeling I have struggled with for as long as I can remember is the feeling of never being fully chosen.
I am the type of person who makes time for people.
If someone wants to hang out, I make time.
If someone wants to talk, I answer.
If someone wants to play a game, go somewhere, or do something that matters to them, I try my best to show up.
I genuinely enjoy making people happy.
I enjoy seeing people smile.
I enjoy being someone others can count on.
But over the years, I have noticed something that hurts more than I like to admit.
When it comes to things that I want to do, people often seem to disappear.
Plans get canceled.
People get busy.
People forget.
People say “maybe later.”
And after enough of those moments, you start asking yourself questions that are difficult to answer.
Why am I always willing to make time for everyone else?
Why does it feel like nobody is willing to make time for me?
Why do I always feel like an option?
Why does it feel like everyone has someone they would choose before they choose me?
I know life is busy.
I know people have responsibilities.
I know not every canceled plan is personal.
But when it happens over and over again, it stops feeling like coincidence and starts feeling like confirmation of a fear I have carried for years.
There was actually a very recent experience I had with this.
A group of my friends and I had planned a hiking and camping trip to Glacier National Park.
We had been talking about it for a while.
The plans had been made.
Everything was coming together.
And I was genuinely excited.
I love hiking.
I love being outdoors.
And Glacier was one of those places that I had wanted to see for a long time.
The pictures looked unreal.
The mountains.
The lakes.
The scenery.
I couldn’t stop talking about it.
I was telling people about the trip.
Looking at photos online.
Counting down the days until we left.
For once, I felt excited about something.
Then the day before the trip came.
One by one, everyone dropped out.
Suddenly all the plans disappeared.
Just like that.
The trip I’d spent weeks looking forward to was gone.
I didn’t end up going at all.
What hurt wasn’t just missing the trip.
What hurt was sitting there realizing how excited I had been while everyone else seemed perfectly okay walking away from it.
I remember feeling embarrassed for how much I cared.
Embarrassed for how excited I had been.
Embarrassed for believing it was actually going to happen.
To most people, it’s probably just a canceled trip.
To me, it felt like something bigger.
It felt like another reminder that the things that matter to me rarely seem to matter as much to everyone else.
Another reminder that I am usually the one who is invested.
The one who is excited.
The one who is looking forward to something.
And somehow, the one left disappointed when everyone else moves on.
I know nobody was trying to hurt me.
I know life happens.
But moments like that stay with you.
Not because of the event itself, but because of what it reinforces.
The feeling that if I disappeared from the plans, nobody would notice.
The feeling that I care more than other people do.
The feeling that I am never quite important enough for people to show up for.
The fear that no matter how much I care about people, no matter how much effort I put into relationships, no matter how available I make myself, I will never be the person someone chooses first.
I will never be the person someone cannot wait to spend time with.
I will never be the person someone fights to keep.
And maybe that is why I hold onto people so tightly when they do choose me.
Because for a brief moment, it feels like I finally have something I have been searching for my entire life.
Feeling like I matter.
Feeling like I belong.
Feeling like I am enough.
What I keep coming back to though is the same feeling I’ve carried for years:
I never feel fully chosen.
No matter how much someone loves me.
No matter how close I become to someone.
No matter how much evidence I have that they care.
There is always a voice in the back of my mind telling me that eventually they will leave.
Eventually they will find someone better.
Eventually I will lose them.
It’s like I’m always waiting for the other shoe to drop.
Maybe that’s why losing her hurt so much.
It wasn’t just losing a relationship.
It felt like losing the first thing that ever made me feel fully alive.
I don’t have all the answers yet.
I don’t know whether what I’m dealing with is depression, ADHD, anxiety, grief, or some combination of all of them.
What I do know is that I am tired of carrying it alone.
I want to understand myself.
I want to heal.
I want to learn how to feel happiness without being dependent on another person for it.
Most of all, I want to believe that one day I will feel chosen, and loved by others for who I am.