“Wait, feelings are supposed to be IN THE BODY?”

Mentor: “…and how do you feel in your body about that?”

Me: “Wait, feelings are supposed to be IN THE BODY?”

For the first few months after this exchange, I thought, “Maybe I’m just different and don’t have feelings in my body. Maybe that’s just a weird thing that happens to other people but not to me.”

Nope.

Turns out I couldn’t feel emotions in my body. Sure, I’d get butterflies in my stomach or “know” emotions in my head, but I didn’t notice things like “a feeling of expansiveness in my chest”, “tingling in my fingers”, “tension in my arms”, or “pleasure on my skin”.

Ok, I was living at 360p. So what?

Well, the nervous system is a distributed system, so information must propagate somehow.

“Feelings in the body” seem like a very common way to experience this: [1]

Illustrated: Where I DIDN’T feel emotional sensations in my body lol. ( Maps of subjective feelings )

This information flows freely, unless there’s resistance. When there’s resistance to feelings, updates fail to permeate the entire system. [2] And there was a lot of resistance in my system…

The resistance: The unawareness was locally optimal, helping mitigate pain and other risks. Feeling my feelings then made my life worse (locally).

Was the unawareness globally optimal? No. Life was in 360p when it could’ve been in 4k.

I’d brush my teeth too hard and only notice from the blood on the sink, not the pain.

Other people made decisions in seconds by checking their gut. I made a decision by agonizing my way to a heady answer that still felt bad. Decision-making spiraled because every option felt equally gray.

I thought I didn’t like animals! I missed the beauty around me—even though I found it incredibly cute when crushes would suddenly stop on a snowy street overwhelmed by what they were soaking in.

Everything I did had to be “useful”. All of my desires needed reasons.

I couldn’t tell the difference between “I’m feeling really jealous right now” and “Did I eat something bad?”

I couldn’t ex…