not knowing what feelings feel like

Emotions are hard. I don't understand them. I can't figure them out. There are very very very few of them that I can recognize in myself. I have written about this before, and it is something I still have so many struggles with. Alexithymia. It is one of the things I hate most about the way my brain works.

It would be so much easier sometimes to figure out how to fix things if I knew what was wrong.

For instance, right now.

I know something is wrong. My stomach hurts, but not in a throwing-up/sick sort of way. More in a tied-up-in-knots way. My brain is jumbled and going every which way. I have been lying on the floor for the past... hmmm well, it has actually been over 4 hours. But I have been watching Scrubs, so it hasn't been all useless. [Lying on the floor, admittedly, in itself isn't necessarily a bad sign. My family lies on the ground all the time (partially because we never had enough chairs in our family room growing up, so usually at least one person has to sit or lie on the floor.] I haven't cried, and I don't think I want to cry.

I don't know what this is.

I don't understand how people can just know that they are nervous or jealous or embarrassed or tired. I've tried asking people. No one can explain it satisfactorily. They just "know" that that is what nervousness "feels" like. It is extremely unhelpful.

I want to know what I feel like right now. I want a name for the specific emotions. Because when you can give things names, then it is so, so much easier to start addressing them. I want to be able to categorize and classify my emotions. Because identification and classification are the first step to fixing something.

I want to be able to answer boyfriend when he asks me how I feel with more than a "good" or a "bad" or a "not sure".

I don't understand how this works for other people. I know the temporary solution. It's on my giant flow chart in my closet. I haven't eaten recently (because it is 2:19 currently and I ate dinner several hours ago). I need to eat. And it is after midnight. I need to go to sleep. But those are both temporary solutions to a feeling that I have had since before dinner, before midnight. Admittedly, the temporary solution is what I need now, because it is attainable. But I want a fix. I want this to be fixed. I want there to be a way that I can understand emotions that are happening to me and name them, because that seems like a basic self-aware thing to be able to do.

I don't have words for them. And I know there are words that exist for them. I even know what the words are. But I have absolutely no idea how to map them on to the actual experiences that happen or the actual sensations that I assume are emotions.

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