Steven LaChance Blog

This morning I sat down to write and worked on a few things. The grammar was right and the punctuation was right. The sentences did exactly what they were supposed to do, and that was the problem.

None of it felt like me. It felt like I was behaving on the page, keeping things in order instead of inhabiting the work. What bothered me was not that the writing was bad. It was that it was proper, clean, correct. Too correct.

I could feel myself performing instead of letting the writing misbehave. It was not wrong, it just was not alive. It was not messy or risky or uncomfortable. It was safe, and that unsettled me more than anything else.

It made me stop and admit something I did not want to look at. I am not losing the ability to feel. I am losing the ability for those feelings to matter.

They still show up, anger, sadness, grief, even moments of hope, but they do not land the way they used to. They arrive, register somewhere, and pass through without shifting much inside me. It is not indifference. It is something quieter, like the volume has been turned down and I did not notice when it happened.

The world does not give you much room to feel anymore. It is one thing after another, cruelty, noise, outrage, contradiction. Every day there is something new you are supposed to react to, carry, process, survive. After a while, something in you adapts, not because you do not care, but because caring all the time starts to feel unsustainable. From the inside, this gets labeled as numbness, but that never quite feels accurate. It feels more like pulling back just enough to keep functioning.

If you are honest, you may recognize it. That sense of going through the motions while right under the surface there is pressure, like you could scream if you let yourself, and maybe the reason you do not is because you are not sure you would know how to stop once you started. That tension is not hysteria or weakness. It is social dissonance.

It happens when the world you are expected to live inside no longer matches what your nervous system knows is wrong. The values do not line up. The noise never shuts off. The chaos does not resolve. So you numb it a little, not to disappear, but to survive. From the outside, it looks like coping and normal life. From the inside, it feels like living slightly withdrawn from your own reactions, and that is not apathy. It is self-preservation.

This is also where control slips in. Emotional flattening is not accidental. It is useful. A population that still functions but no longer fully registers what it is living through is easier to manage. When outrage exhausts itself and grief never finishes processing, people stop resisting not because they agree, but because they are tired.

This is the state of being Orwell’s 1984 warned us about, not constant terror but constant pressure, not silence but noise without resolution, where you are not beaten into submission so much as worn down until resistance begins to feel pointless. It is the same condition Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale described so clearly, where control does not begin with chains but with normalization, with people learning to live inside conditions they know are wrong because the alternative feels unbearable.

“Nolite te bastardes carborundorum.”

That phrase about not letting the bastards get you down was never meant to be ironic. It was a warning, because this is exactly how they do it, not all at once, but slowly, by exhausting your capacity to care until survival starts to look like compliance.

If you feel yourself going numb, that does not mean you are failing. It means something in you still knows this is not how things are supposed to be, and that knowledge has not gone away.

So I arrive at the question of how we stop the noise long enough for feeling to return.

And the answer is not an answer at all.

I simply do not know.