My peeves about feeling 'nothing', being 'empty'

I have had this conversation so many times; the euphemisms people use to express their emotions. It's not even hyperbole, these things they say. It's the opposite of hyperbole, unless they happen to be the luckiest people alive. If their assumption were true, why seek sympathy from me? Why disparage the grand institution of depression if it could be characterized by the absence of sensation? If you feel nothing when you're depressed, then by all means let me poke a syringe in your brain so I can mainline these juices into my body. Medical science needs to autopsy you freaks. It would help me.

You feel numb? You feel empty? If I felt 'nothing', or 'empty', or 'numb', I would mow the lawn. I would take my dog for a walk. I would go to work and be productive. I would drink starbucks and call all my friends and tell them why the ending of LOST sucked. Let's be reasonable, the alt-reality was pointless. Why did Jack have a son? Why did they have to protect a glowing rock in a cave? Jacob should have just filled the whole cave with concrete, but I digress.

You know what I feel when I'm depressed? 'Everything' is maybe better hyperbole than 'nothing', but I want to resist that impulse too. I am not going to say, 'I feel everything'. I do feel miserable. I feel stressed.

I think about the girl who dumped me last September, who cheated on me so often it became tortuously surreal. I feel this intense sense of pain associated with every memory we shared together. Of me just getting home from her house, reading a text from her that she was leaving me. That I wasn't suitable for her, 'for a number of reasons'. That she could never, 'commit to a guy like me'.

I'll still lay on my bed, wanting to call her, waiting to hear her voice again so I can apologize profusely for whatever it was she believed made me a bad boyfriend. In 34 years, I have never cheated on any woman. Whenever I say that, I get this uncomfortable, judging stare from people who know what I am and what people like me are capable of. No, I've never cheated. I lock myself into my bedroom and masturbate for 2-3 days straight, fighting fatigue, dehydration and usually by the end of it, painful abrasions, but I've never cheated. It doesn't 'solve' it, but it makes my behavior remarkably better looking 'on paper'.

The sacrifices I make the lock myself in can not be appreciated by normal people and it certainly wasn't appreciated by my by ex, but I will think about her obsessively. I think about a lot of things obsessively and they're always fighting for the spotlight.

I'll get up and pace around my house (I think I'll do that for the next 5 hours until I have to take a shower and go to work), watching television for 15 seconds on each channel for an hour or two, long enough to be annoyed that the program is making it difficult for me to fixate on my misery (LOL), wondering about how pointless my life is, how I've not accomplished anything of value. I feel all the guilt and shame of never applying myself, of skipping out on things because I was stupid.

I let whatever problem consume me until I get so worked up, I force myself on my bed, fold my arms over my chest, take deep breaths and force my eyelids shut (force them with my fingers). Then I'll fantasize about things being better, simple projects that I can get done the next day. This sometimes works for, like, a couple seconds. Teetered to the bed.

It's like a boring, monotonous, minimum wage job. Less-than. A zero-wage job. I feel forced down, anxious, very anxious, starved for attention, but not being able to stand 5 second of company if I should ever have it, self-loathing, angry, fatalistic, but never 'empty', never 'numb', never 'nothing'.

Why would anyone who was ever depressed say that they were those things? It is the opposite of what is true.

As always, if you think otherwise, you can drink or eat something from the toilet (take advantage of either option). LOL Anyway, I just wanted to rant. I can not sleep again tonight.

JUst to let you know, it's possible to feel nothing. But for me it's not really possible to work when one feels nothing. You can take the zombie body to work... but you cannot produce anything really.... and don't even talk about intellectual work...

feeling nothing is one of the worst feelings ever.

I want to believe you. I have no reason to believe you're lying, but I just do not know how that's possible. Saying that "feeling nothing" is one of the worst "feelings" seems contradictory.

I have felt extremely fatigued before, so much that I can't finish sentences in my head. That's when I go to sleep. Is there a way to explain what goes through your head then? I just don't understand the concept.

well, we are still beings with a brain.... so you know you should feel something, but nothing comes. No excitement, no appropriate saddness. One is not even sure if they are alive still.

Maybe nothing is not semantically correct, but does it matter? We are supposed to feel something (approprietelly).

What goes through my head? Very little. Of course you have a memory of not always being that way... but at the moment it is all gone.

I guess when I say I feel nothing, what I really mean is indifference, or apathy. It feels like something, just nothing good. I think for me at least when I say I feel nothing, it is because I feel nothing of what I normally would, good nor bad, just a whole new feeling of intellectual and emotional indifference. Which basically feels empty, like nothing.

Yes. It's really hard to describe and impossible to convey, but... it's kind of like being trapped in another dimension. But no sense of being able to go across let alone having a will to do so. I've even had the perception of not having a face and seeing myself (from outside myself) looking out from a skull. For those keeping score, that's 3 times removed. And having no reaction to my not being there, no reaction to seeing this image, no reaction to being outside. Or? Am I looking from it? At it? ("It" because there's no sense that it's me or even alive.) Both? Neither? I can't tell, and it doesn't occur to me to care. (I don't think this at the time, I don't think anything, don't feel anything, I just see it as a visual entity. Just trying to describe it. Keep in mind that this is only one slice of the reality.) One would be horrified if they could. Suspended animation and no scream.

Having had many depressions of both sorts, they both suck. That said, I only go catatonic/leaden paralysis in these kind. If I were able to sense it, I'd probably realize that I'd pretty well kill to have been able to cry. Hell, sometimes even to move in any way even approaching normal. It is not always this extreme, but trust me, it sucks at lesser degrees as well.

I wish it were like tired, then I would simply sleep. In trying to understand it, it's well to not confuse it with "neutral", in a not-one-way or another sort of way, just "whatever", where one might go out and mow the lawn. It's not like that at all.

While I can accept that "nothing" is probably not 100% accurate and likely an exaggeration, I think that "numb" or "empty" are valid descriptions of the apathy that I and obviously others sometimes feel when depressed.
Not all depressions are the same, I have had depressions where I have felt a constant longing to die, filled with self hatred for everything that I was and had done - where thoughts and feelings crowed my head and pushed and shoved to voice their condemnation of me.
Yet still there is another beast, a depression of a quieter and more insidious nature, where every breath is meaningless. There is no enjoyment or pleasure. There is no hope or desire. There is no point in moving, eating or living. Even sleeping holds but a brief elusive respite. This is the "nothing" that I speak of - where I don't even care enough to die.

I sometimes have this nightmare. I "wake up" in the dream and I float in the middle of black nothingness, realizing that whole my life was a hallucination or something I made up, none of it was ever real. I am there, floating and there is literally nothing. (or alternativelly I fishing reading book of my life... and I don't know who I am. I know I am not person i read the book about though).

Because nothing does exist in the universe, in places where the stars are too far away to give light...

That is how it feels at times.

This. Apathy is what most people mean when they say they feel nothing, and it really is the worst sensation to feel utterly indifferent to everything. Especially when you know you should care, you know you cared before, but you can't muster the energy to bother anymore.

When I say I feel empty what I generally mean is that I'm there in body but not in spirit. I'm going through the motions of life but the person who should be there just... isn't.

Thanks for the replies, but I will give my opinion the apathy angle. I think it's still a bad description and kind of manipulative if it's just apathy. Even saying 'numb' or 'empty', BlackPup.

I can completely understand where you would feel these things towards certain people or topics. I can promise you, when I'm at work and depressed, I do not care about work. It does not mean anything to me. I could urinate on my boss' desk, get fired and not care in the slightest.

Another example, when I am in my room and I get a phone call from my mom, I do not care about her. I do not answer the phone. I literally do not make the connection that she is the person who gave me life, sacrificed for me or loves me. I just see it as an annoyance, if anything. She becomes a stranger. I feel numb, empty or nothing towards her, specifically. Or maybe perhaps 90% of the world, including myself sometimes, but I do not view as me devaluing 'them' so much as me valuing 'something else' much, much more.

My brain simply does not afford me the resources to care about anything other than whatever I am fixated on. It's like having a paper cut, then someone chops off your foot. Suddenly, you can't feel the paper cut. Maybe that's a bad analogy.

If that perspective is true then, saying 'nothing' is still dishonest. It's being selective. You value 'nothing' in relation to something you do value very much, which perhaps is the misery itself.

By that measure, I can always say I value nothing. I am sitting at my desk and I do not value a lot of things. Practically, I do not value them. I do not feel guilty for not valuing them either, nor do I think I should. I just can't muster up the energy to feel value towards them. My boss, for instance, if he died tomorrow, I wouldn't care. I do not have the energy to manufacture a relationship there right now.

Not valuing my mom is just kind of an extension of that strategy, imo. I still feel that saying 'nothing' is a very bad way of putting it, but thank you for the responses.

I think that's fair, I think when people say "nothing" they are not trying to be dishonest, they are just trying to describe what they are feeling, and it's something that is foreign to many, simple, but then again complicated. Nothing is probably the only way a lot of us know how to describe this feeling of emptiness.

What would be a simple, few word way to relay the feeling to another? Asking simply because I am curious if there is a better way, and what it would be.