I Feel Flattened Inside My Own Life

Dear Delyara, That is the word that keeps returning. Flattened. As if all the parts of me that once rose more naturally — sensuality, curiosity, humor, desire, appetite for more, appetite for anything really — have been pressed down under years of carrying too much, being too available, and staying emotionally composed inside structures that kept taking and taking. The life still functions. That is what makes this so hard to explain. I am not collapsed. I am present. I am productive. I am needed. And still, I can feel how much of me has gone quiet in ways that do not feel healthy or mature or wise. They feel starved.