I want to write about something I have been turning over for the better part of a decade, and that I have not, until now, found a way to articulate clearly enough to put down on paper.
The thing is this. I am thirty-eight, and I am, by my own honest accounting, never truly happy and never truly sad. I have good days. I have bad days. I have, like anyone, the full range of small daily emotional weather. But the weather, when I observe it from any distance, operates within a narrow band. The highs do not, in any meaningful sense, soar. The lows do not, in any meaningful sense, crash. The whole emotional life I have been having, for as long as I can remember, has been conducted at a particular middle volume that I had, until somewhere in my early thirties, simply assumed was how feelings worked.
I want to be careful about how I describe this, because the cultural register for this kind of disclosure tends to push toward either a clinical framing—am I depressed?—or toward a self-congratulatory one—am I emotionally regulated? Neither framing fits. I am not depressed, by any honest reading of what depression actually involves. I am also not, by any reasonable measure, particularly well-regulated. I am something different, something that the standard frameworks do not quite have a name for. I am, on close examination, a person whose emotional dial has been set, somewhere in childhood, to a particular limited range, and who has been operating on that range ever since without noticing that the range was, in fact, a setting rather than a natural condition.
What I started to notice in my early thirties
The noticing began, as best I can reconstruct it, somewhere around thirty-two or thirty-three. I had, by then, accumulated enough life experience to have had a few of the events that, in most people’s lives, produce strong emotional responses. The end of a long relationship. The selling of the restaurants, which had been the structural project of my twenties. The loss of a few people. Various smaller but still significant events that, in any standard emotional reckoning, should have produced, in me, a range of feeling that matched the size of what had happened.
What I noticed, instead, was that my responses to these events were calibrated, on examination, to roughly the same emotional volume as my responses to much smaller daily events. The breakup, when I looked at how I had actually felt during it, had produced about the same level of internal weather as a difficult day at work. The selling of the restaurants, which had been the largest professional event of my adult life, had produced about the same level of internal weather as a mildly disappointing meal. The losses of the people had produced, in some honest sense, less weather than they should have. The dial was set. The dial was, for whatever reason, not going to move into the higher ranges that the events themselves seemed to warrant.
This was, when I first noticed it clearly, a strange thing to discover about myself. I had assumed, throughout my twenties, that I was simply a person whose emotional life happened to be calmer than most. I had even, occasionally, mentioned this to friends with a small note of pride, as if the calmness were a feature of my character that I had, by some combination of temperament and discipline, achieved. The early-thirties recognition was that the calmness was not, in any sense, an achievement. It was, more accurately, a structural feature of my emotional apparatus that had been installed long before I had any choice in the matter.
What I now think the dial was doing
I have a hypothesis, which I want to advance carefully because I am not entirely sure it is right.
The hypothesis is that the dial was set, somewhere in my early childhood, to a particular limited range, because in the household I grew up in, big feelings cost more than they were worth. I want to be clear about what I mean by this. The household was not, in any obvious sense, a difficult one. My parents loved me. My parents were, by every external measure, good parents. The household was warm.
What the household was not, on close examination, well-equipped for, was the management of a small child’s larger emotional outputs. The reasons were generational. My parents had, in turn, been raised by parents whose own equipment was even less calibrated for this kind of work. The chain stretched back further than anyone in the family was in a position to trace. The result was that, by the time I arrived in the household, the available bandwidth for processing a child’s bigger feelings was not, in any structural sense, what the bigger feelings would have required.
The child, in a household of this kind, registers this quickly. I was the older of two children, and a particular kind of temperamentally kind child, which meant that I noticed, very young, that producing larger emotional outputs in my parents’ presence created, in the household, a kind of strain that did not, in turn, produce the soothing the outputs were ostensibly asking for. The strain was not punishment. The strain was, more accurately, the slight overload of a household that was not, in some real way, equipped to manage what I was bringing to it.
I learned, accordingly, by some age between five and seven, to manage the outputs internally rather than to bring them to the household. The internal management produced, over years, a gradual recalibration of the dial. The dial was being turned down, increment by increment, by the small daily decisions to not produce the larger outputs. By the time I was twelve, the dial was set at a particular reduced range. By the time I was twenty-five, the setting had become, in some real way, identity. I did not register that I was a person whose dial had been turned down. I registered, more accurately, that I was a person whose emotional life happened, naturally, to occupy a narrower band than most people’s. The naturalness was, of course, not natural. It was the residue of decades of small recalibrations that had begun before I was old enough to have any opinion about them.
What this configuration costs
I want to be honest about what this configuration is currently costing me, because the cultural register for this kind of disclosure tends to skip the cost or to dramatize it, and I want to do neither.
The cost is, in some real way, modest in any single year. I am, as I have said, never truly sad. The not-being-truly-sad is, by external metrics, a feature most people would prefer to have. The cost of the configuration is not the cost of constant suffering. The cost is, more specifically, the absence of access to a particular range of emotional experience that, I now suspect, is part of what makes a life feel like a life that has been lived rather than merely conducted.
I do not, for example, have access to the kind of joy that other people describe at the births of children or at major life milestones. I have access to a more modulated version of the same. The modulated version is fine. The modulated version is also, on close examination, a smaller version of what would be available if the dial were operating at its natural range. The smaller version is what I have. The larger version, if it ever existed in me, has not been available for as long as I can remember.
I do not, similarly, have access to the kind of grief that I have watched other people experience at the deaths of people they loved. I have access to a more modulated version of the same. The modulated version allows me to function. The modulated version also, on examination, does not let me fully metabolize the losses. The losses sit, in some real way, partially undigested in my interior life, because the apparatus that would have processed them has been operating at a reduced setting that does not, in fact, allow for the processing to fully occur.
This is the cost. The cost is not visible from outside. The cost is also, on the available evidence, real. I am, in some real way, living a smaller emotional life than I would have lived if the original dial had been allowed to operate at its natural range. The smaller life is not unhappy. The smaller life is, more accurately, somewhat thin in the specific dimension that the original recalibration narrowed.
What can be done, given all this
The honest acknowledgment is that I am not sure how much of this can be undone. The recalibration was done across years of childhood. The apparatus that would have been allowed to develop at full range did not develop at full range. The development that did not occur cannot, in most cases, be retroactively recovered. The dial may, by this point in my life, be set at the only range it has access to.
What I have started doing, more modestly, is the slow practice of noticing when the dial is being turned down in real time. This is harder than it sounds. The turning-down is automatic. It happens beneath conscious awareness, in the small moments when an emotional response would, by some inherited operating system, be inappropriate or excessive. The response, accordingly, gets clipped before it fully emerges. I do not, in most cases, register the clipping. I register only the clipped response, which I then experience as my natural response.
What I have been trying to do, in the last few years, is to catch the clipping. To notice, in selected moments, that a larger response was forming, and that some internal mechanism cut it short before it could be fully felt. The catching, when it works, allows me to sit, briefly, with the larger response that would have occurred if the mechanism had not intervened. The sitting is, at first, uncomfortable. The discomfort is the body registering that it is being asked to inhabit a range it has not inhabited for thirty years. The inhabiting is, over time, slightly easier than it was at first. The dial is not, by this practice, fully reopened. The dial is, in selected moments, allowed to operate at a slightly wider range than it has been operating at by default.
This is not, by any external metric, dramatic work. The work is mostly internal. The work is mostly invisible. The work is, on the available evidence, the most consequential repair I am currently able to do on the apparatus that my upbringing installed.
I do not know, yet, what the larger range will, in the end, contain. I suspect that some of it will be uncomfortable in ways I have not, by my long acclimation to the dimmed setting, been prepared for. I suspect that some of it will, also, contain access to forms of feeling that I have, by long absence, half-forgotten were available. The not-being-truly-happy, in particular, is the form I am most curious about. The truly-sad I can do without, for as long as the apparatus permits. The truly-happy is the one I want, in the time remaining to me, to see whether I can, in some small way, recover.
The dial was turned down because, in 1992, in a household that was doing its best with limited equipment, the bigger feelings cost more than they were worth. The cost is no longer being levied. The dial is, slowly, allowed to come back up. Whether it will come up far enough, by sixty, to let me finally feel the things I have been keeping at arm’s length for thirty years, is a question I do not yet know the answer to. I am, however, finally asking it.
