Emotional Self-awareness

There has been one aspect of my life which has been, in hindsight, a constant, and that has been a low emotional self-awareness. For example, if someone asks me how I am feeling, I have no idea in 99% of situations. I have to process the idea, do some self-reflection, and even then, I’m likely to come up with “OK, I guess.” That’s if I am being honest.

Note while I have low self-emotional awareness, I seem to have hyper interpersonal emotional awareness. I am much more responsive to others emotional presence than my own.

Occasionally I do feel something such that I can respond to said question with more than “I honestly don’t know.” Like today. Today I feel, and have felt for some days, surreal. I’ll get to the reason for that later. It has made me reflect on my general emotional numbness vs the times I do feel something internal.

Now I cannot truly compare to another. I can only speculate based on the communicated experiences I get to know of, and experiences are individual things, just as much as language is also individual. I understand that some people appear to have a more intimate sense of their emotional state than I can relate to, so I intellectually suppose that there are subjective differences in experiences.

In my experience, I am only aware of my own emotional state if it is unusual and has developed slowly, persistently, and consistently, then if this becomes the new norm, that awareness fades.

I have had a few emotional shifts of late. A diminishing of desire for intimate connections. An increase in social discomfort in crowded spaces. A sense of anticipation and disjointedness over the publishing a novella. These have followed each other in sequence. Today, I find myself feeling all 3 simultaneously, to differing degrees.

Day to day variations though have little meaning to me. In contract, many I have had discussions with talk of distinct variations throughout a day, something I cannot relate to, and it seems to be a difference in degree.

I do sense big changes. Something significant happens which shifts the overall atmosphere will affect me. It is the minor variations that I do not relate to.

I will only sense it if I sense it in another first.