Forgotten Drafts CH2- ‘Numb’.

Before I give you all the second draft, I want to thank everybody for the wonderful response on my first draft. If you haven’t read it already, go check out the first chapter in the series of drafts that I’ll now be uploading, titled ‘Forgotten Drafts CH1: ‘Open Wounds.’‘ I was initially hesitant about posting my drafts here, but all of you showed it so much love, I can only be grateful for a platform that lets me share writing that would have otherwise just gone into the recycle bin. So, thank you so much for that!

This second chapter, which I’ve decided to call ‘Numb’, is a draft from a couple of months ago when I was going through something and I was unable to process a couple of things that had happened because it was too much to take in. I still don’t know if I’ll be able to process it, but thankfully, writing about it is a start.

“You know that ringing sensation in your ears when you come to a sudden realization? Time seems to have slowed down into a syrupy mess all around you and all the voices in the background fade into an incoherent, inaudible mumble as you try to process the things that you’ve just understood. Sometimes, it is accompanied by a sinking feeling in the pit of your stomach. Other times, you can feel your blood roaring in your ears and your heart trying to beat its way out of your ribcage. And in other cases still, everything starts to feel like a little too much to take in.

It’s almost as if things suddenly make sense, and yet, don’t make any sense. Your voice dies out in your throat and your breathing suddenly becomes uneven. Everything just goes numb. There’s probably a million things that we’d want to say in such a situation, but the words simply fail to escape us. A heartbreak, a loss— something life-changing, usually something devastating. In an ideal world, I would wish nobody to have ever experienced this in their entire lives. And yet somehow, almost all of us have experienced this at least once.

Snapping out of it takes just a couple of seconds. Then again, what we experience in those few seconds, with our thoughts processing at the speed of light, several of them hitting us, all at once, is nothing that can ever be put into words to make one truly understand how it feels. Unless you’ve already experienced it, though. Because in that case, you already know what I’m talking about. In that second of realization, you feel absolutely nothing. It doesn’t hit you right away, almost as if your thoughts are trying to protect you from the kind of pain that could hit you if you weren’t this numb.

But the truth is that we have to let the pain crash over us at some point because shutting it out is just trying to delay the inevitable from happening. Whether we like it or not, the pain is going to hit us the second the numb feeling fades away and it’s never pretty. Healing isn’t about going out and smelling the roses. It’s not sitting in the middle of a sunny park and having a life-changing moment. That’s not how it works. You have to let yourself feel if you want to keep going.

All those people who tell us to not be emotional about things are just trying to convince themselves that being numb somehow makes things a lot easier. And to some extent, it probably does. After all, it always does feel like a better idea to suffer in silence. But you know how it is! Even the bubbling magma needs a way out sometimes. We’re only human.”

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