When Numbness Becomes Survival

Since moving to London, my mornings have been quieter. I spend much more time alone. It is simply how life evolved when I moved to a new city at 25, an age when most people are building their own lives after education.

As a student, I was always surrounded by friends. We lived almost like a commune, waking up together, spending the day together, and repeating it all the next morning. My energy was always receptive to others, which meant I was easily affected by their moods. Back then, my identity was built around how others saw me and what they expected from me. Moving abroad changed that. At first, it felt terrifying, which is why I took my mother with me. Some might find it embarrassing to bring your mom when you are old enough to have lived a quarter of your life, but I did not care. I had left the UK with horrors behind me from my health condition, and when I looked back, all I could see were memories that pierced me.

What I did not realise was that my mother also needed to leave for a while. She was deeply depressed and burnt out, because our entire family owed its existence to her. Not simply because she gave us life, but because she had always been the most resilient one, the one who held us all together.

My mother is basically the Kris Jenner of our family. None of us would have managed, either individually or together, without her. She poured her energy into others until nothing was left for herself.

As the eldest of four siblings, she grew up with a philosophy that was simple and practical. Born in 1962, she arrived at the tail end of the baby boomers. By the time she was a child, the world was already shifting. The early boomers grew up with Elvis, black and white television, and postwar optimism. Her childhood looked more like the late sixties and seventies: colour television, the moon landing, the Beatles breaking up, and protests on the evening news. Yet her story was not the suburban dream of white picket fences. She was born into a poor family where the air was filled not with talk of freedom or rebellion but with the pressing need to survive.

For her, life’s philosophy was endurance: survive today so you can face tomorrow. Where some had the luxury to rebel, she learned that security was a gift you had to fight for. The dream was not about changing the world but about building a stable one of her own. Despite all the survival skills she acquired, she always had a weakness that surpassed the rest: she had never been able to connect with her feelings.

She had to show up as a grown-up from her childhood. As the eldest, she was not only raising her siblings but also, in a way, parenting her own mother. She always had to appear strong, to be everyone’s everything. That is why it became second nature for her to avoid her negative feelings, to act as if they did not exist, because she saw them as setbacks that could stop her from moving forward. In time, this only grew them stronger.

Eventually, she got herself into law school and created the life of comfort she has today. Yet, her struggles left her with no energy to nurture her emotional side. Struggles of both life and hers to deny her feelings. That’s when she became toxically selfless and numb to her emotions.

When my sister was struggling with addiction, I had given up on her entirely. That was the time when I had to erase the entire mercy for someone I loved. I remember what I told my mom after my sister’s temper reached its worst, after I saw her mistreat the only person who truly tried to save her. When I heard she slapped my mom, I wanted to kill her. My exact words were: “Why do you even bother? She is not part of our family. I do not have a sister like her.”

All of us were victims of her cruelty back then, but still, my mom received the biggest share. Today, my sister is perfectly healthy and one of the most compassionate people I know. Even so, no one can deny that without my mom, she would have ended up in the back of a dumpster.

She was there for us every single time. I even remember a time when she wrote my college essay for me.

Between the roles assigned to her by birth order and the ones she took on for her own family, she never had the time to tend to her own emotional needs. She became cold-blooded. I never blamed her for that. If my mother’s purpose in life was to save her family, mine became to save her from herself.

When she came with me to London, she was deeply depressed. She grew numb instead of devastated whenever something bad happened. She told me that she can’t even cry anymore; she forgot how to feel all kinds of emotions. That was when I realised how little we value negative emotions. We do not see the good they do for us until we are unable to feel them.

Every emotion carries its shadow. Without sorrow, joy loses its shape. Without anger, love has no edge. When we shut ourselves off from the darkness, we shut ourselves off from the light as well. The truth is, we cannot feel the fullness of life if we numb half of it. By denying the weight of pain, we also deny the lift of happiness.

My mother saw it as a weakness to feel sad or upset. She thought that if she let her emotions take control, she would never have accomplished the things that carried our family forward.

This year, I took a CBT course called Rational Emotive Behavioural Therapy, and I was struck by the reality of life.

No one has the power to make us feel anything; what we feel is born from how we choose to interpret what happens. That truth matters most when life is hard, because if we see ourselves only as victims of circumstance, we hand away our power. Taking accountability is not about denying pain, but about recognising that our beliefs shape it. My mother thought her survival depended on shutting her emotions away, yet what she could not see was that by changing how she met them, she might have found strength without losing her ability to feel.

During the time we spent together in London, the due date for submitting my dissertation was very close; therefore, my only focus was on studying. Away from the weight of her roles, in body and in mind, my mom rediscovered joy, allowed herself to feel, and learned to put herself first.

Even so, it didn’t take her long to revisit old patterns when she was back in her regular life. When we spoke yesterday, I could hear clearly that she had returned to depression and burnout. Yet the fault was hers to take. She had surrendered, spending her days like a leaf floating downstream, waiting for life to end so she could be free of us.

My mother believed that feeling was weakness, and so she numbed herself. But the truth is the opposite. If you surrender the control of your life, no one will step in to change it for you. Life is only heavy when we chase what we cannot change. Freedom only begins when we hold steady to what is within our reach.

Our strength lies in allowing ourselves to feel, in knowing that nothing is the end of the world except the end of the world itself. Once we accept that, life becomes lighter, and we are free to live it fully.