12/23/2025
"Watching yourself lose your spark is one of the cruellest experiences, because it feels like you are still here, still breathing, still doing what needs to be done, yet the part of you that made life feel worth waking up for is slipping further away each week. It is not just sadness. It is the grief of noticing that your smile is thinner, your laughter is rarer, your patience is shorter, and your eyes do not recognise themselves the way they used to. It is like standing inside your own life and realising you no longer feel at home in it.
What makes it even harder is that this kind of pain does not always look dramatic from the outside. You can still get dressed, still answer politely, still show up, still complete tasks, still say “I’m fine” with a face that convinces people. But inside, you are running on fumes. You are surviving on habit, duty, and whatever scraps of strength you can gather, while quietly wondering why everything feels so heavy when you are doing your best just to make it through the day without falling apart.
The loss of your spark rarely happens for no reason. It usually comes after too much has been asked of you for too long, after you have carried worry and responsibility as if they were normal, after you have swallowed your needs so often that you stopped hearing them clearly. It can come from constantly being the strong one, the dependable one, the one who keeps the peace, the one who copes so well that nobody thinks to check on you properly. It can come from being hurt and then expected to move on quickly, as if your heart should heal on a schedule that suits other people.
There is a specific heartbreak in missing the woman you used to be. Not because you were perfect, but because you remember her aliveness. You remember the way she could feel excited about small things, how she could dream without immediately talking herself out of it, how she could laugh and mean it, how she could trust that better days were possible. When you are numb, even the memory of her can feel like a wound, because it brings up the fear that she is gone for good, and it is frightening to mourn yourself while you are still living.
The worst part is knowing it is happening and feeling too tired to stop it. You can be aware, intelligent, self-reflective, and still unable to reach the part of you that used to respond to joy. You can read the right words, make plans, try harder, and still feel nothing has changed. You might even start blaming yourself for not “snapping out of it”, as if exhaustion is a choice. But when your mind and body have been pushed past their limit, they do not respond to pressure with brilliance, they respond with shutdown.
Numbness is often misunderstood, especially by people who have never lived inside it. They think you are uninterested, ungrateful, distant, lazy, and cold. But numbness is not the absence of a heart. It is what happens when feeling everything becomes too much, and your system tries to protect you the only way it knows how. It is your inner world saying, “I cannot carry all of this at once.” It is not a character flaw. It is a warning sign that you have been surviving without enough safety, rest, or support.
Sometimes the deepest pain is not what happened, but what you had to do to keep going afterwards. The moments you had to swallow your tears because nobody had time for them. The times you were expected to forgive quickly so you would not be labelled difficult. The days you showed up for everyone while you quietly fell apart in private. The relationships where you gave and gave, hoping that one day you would be met with the same care, only to realise you were being loved in a way that still made you feel alone.
And there is another quiet ache that comes with losing your spark: the guilt. The guilt for not being as productive. The guilt for cancelling plans. The guilt for needing space. The guilt for not replying fast enough, not laughing at jokes, not being “good company”. The guilt for the simple fact that you are struggling, as if your pain is an inconvenience to the world. But the truth is, you do not need to justify your suffering in order for it to be real, and you do not need to perform wellness to deserve kindness.
If you are in this place, you deserve to hear this clearly: you do not get your spark back by punishing yourself for losing it. You do not return to yourself by calling yourself weak, broken, dramatic, or behind. You come back in small, steady ways, by treating your tiredness as something that needs care rather than judgement. You come back by letting yourself rest without feeling you must earn it. You come back by admitting what hurts, by telling the truth to the right people, by allowing support to reach you instead of insisting you must handle everything alone.
There are times when you will need more than self-help and positive thinking, and there is no shame in that. Therapy, medical support, honest conversations, time off, changes in environment, and firmer boundaries are not signs that you failed. They are signs that you are finally taking your pain seriously. A healthy life is not built on pretending, and healing is not a performance. It is often quiet. It is often slow. It is often made of tiny choices that nobody applauds but that slowly return you to yourself.
And please remember this, especially on the days you feel empty and unrecognisable: the woman you miss is not dead. She is exhausted. She is buried under years of coping, under unspoken grief, under pressure you were never meant to carry alone. She is waiting for gentleness. She is waiting for a life that does not demand you suffer in silence to prove you are strong. She is waiting for you to stop treating your pain like something to hide and start treating it like something that deserves attention and care.
So if all you can do today is breathe, drink water, wash your face, step outside for a moment, or ask for help, let that be enough. You are not failing because you feel dim. You are recovering from being too brave for too long. Your spark is not gone; it is simply waiting for you to be safe enough to feel again, and it will return most honestly, quietly, steadily, and finally, as you choose yourself with the tenderness you have always deserved."
-Steve De'lano Garcia
