Emotions

By Aarushi Sali

As a teenager, I could hear my parents arguing in the kitchen. Tucked into bed, I heard my mother yelling at my father. On bunk beds, I could hear my sister crying in the bed below me. Younger than me, her heart was fragile. I believed so, atleast. I don’t remember feeling anything specific. Just the knowledge that I must make my sister feel better. I would climb down the ladder and crawl into her bed. I remember once, I held her against my chest and sang her a lullaby. In these instances, I didn’t feel any pain. My friends described how they felt a sense of shallow ‘pity’ when they heard my parents argue when we hung out in my room with my little sister. I never felt any ‘pity’. I learnt that it was a way of expressing concern. However, I never learnt what concern was.

I looked at things in a more realistic way. I learnt to decipher emotions and assess situations in three voice tones– sad, mild, and happy. I integrated these into every conversation with diligence. At the age of 16, I found my mother crying at midnight. I approached her and striked a conversation. I remember making her laugh. That day, I learnt that even when she was sad, a mild tone of voice which slowly became a happy tone of voice helped her. I felt no ‘relief’ or ‘pride’ for making her happy, the way my younger sister described her emotions after she made our mother happy. However, even with the lack of those emotions, I was aware that what I had done was right.

A few months before my 17th birthday, I was diagnosed with Alexithymia – a condition where a person has trouble experiencing emotions. In hindsight, the word had only helped me define my lack of ‘pity’, ‘pride’, ‘relief’, or ‘happiness’. However, I soon realised my parents and sister distanced themselves. I had learnt from movies that when a family does this, I am meant to be sad – a feeling of misery and helplessness. But, I did not feel sad.

My mother called me psychotic.

Around the age of 22, I got a boyfriend – a man that would give me companionship in turn for physical attention. I found a great deal of bodily pleasure with him yet, I felt no ‘love’ which people described. My ‘heart’ did not feel bouncy, there were no ‘butterflies’ in my belly, and there were most certainly no goosebumps arising on my body. Cognitively, I wondered if having these emotions would make my life better. In actuality though, my life was not bad. It could not be. I had everything any neurotypical person would ‘need’.

Around the age of 27, I got pregnant. In this time of my life, I felt discomfort and pain. I felt nothing that many women in the parenting classes described. I had felt no giddiness when the test was positive, I never felt ‘excitement’ when the baby kicked. However, to keep my husband happy, I would change my facial expressions and voice tones. Soon, after four hours of pain, I had a baby boy.

He was cute, I could tell. I felt no sense of 'affection’ towards him. I felt no need to provide him with the world or protect him — my husband talked about these feelings. I found no problem in life, going about it simply the same way I used to. I watched the baby learn to walk and eat biscuits, I knew that I was meant to be doting. When the baby was an year old, I realised that he would need guidance to ‘feel’ things in an orderly manner. I read many books to understand how to raise him.

He did things similar to other children. THings that other parents seemed to get angry at. From the books, I had learnt that ‘anger’ was a negative emotion that helped no one, it would impact his impressionable mind badly. Therefore, I talked to him in mild tone of voice. Sometimes, when he did things that hurt other children, I would talk to him in a sad tone of voice. As he grew older, I started receiving compliments on how well behaved my little boy was. In those moments, I would smile and nod. As I looked at the behaviours of other children that came to our house to play with my boy, I realised I was doing a much better job than most other parents in raising my child.

My boy started asking questions like whether I loved him, or did he make me happy. To questions such as these, I answered along the lies of “with all my heart”. I had no intention of hurting this boy’s emotions just because I had none. I wanted him to be happy. I learnt to teach him values and morals through demonstrations of my own behaviours. I learnt to ask him for his opinion on things too, rather than make him do what I believed best.

I started talking to other parents when my child started school. I realised that the parents’ emotions were what made them bad parents. There urge to protect, provide and nurture forced them to yell when angry, and cry when sad. Perhaps, having alexithymia helped me raise a good boy.

I raised a good person that could express his emotions. I did this only because I had no emotions.

By Aarushi Sali