Watching Your Life Through a Window

On feeling separated from your own experience.

Fog on the water in Samsø, Denmark. 📷

A brief interruption before I share my Annual Review recap with you for next year. See, last week I was working on it, but I kept getting distracted. When I started this new newsletter in January I promised to be honest with you—and lately I’ve been feeling very anxious. Even as I made plans for next year and reflected on many good things from the year that’s ending, I couldn’t shake the feeling of “separated-ness” that seldom left me. So I figured, might as well share about that as well.

Previously in this series:

• 2024 Annual Review

• Turning Dreams Into Plans

• How Do You Want to Feel?

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The most frustrating part might be when things are actually going well. You can list all the positives: fulfilling projects, good health, relatively stable relationships. You know, intellectually, that you should feel grateful, excited, or at least content. But it's like trying to taste food when you have a cold—you can see the ingredients, but you can't quite experience the flavor.

You're going through the motions of planning for the year ahead. You write down goals, you think about what you want to accomplish, you make lists and update the spreadsheet. All the while, there's this soft melancholy humming in the background. Not quite depression, not quite emptiness—more like watching someone else's life through a window and trying to feel something about it.

The plans themselves are solid. Maybe even inspiring, if you could just connect with them fully. But there's this gap between knowing what you want and feeling motivated to pursue it. You find yourself asking: Is this what I actually want? Or am I just following a script of what I'm supposed to want?

You wonder if you should push through it or pause and wait for the feeling to pass. If you should talk to someone about it or if trying to explain it would just make it feel more real. If maybe this disconnected feeling is trying to teach you something important, or if it's just a temporary glitch in your brain's operating system.

The strange thing about dissociation is that even as it creates distance, it also offers a kind of clarity. When you're slightly removed from your own life, you can sometimes see patterns you miss when you're fully immersed in it. Like how you've been running too fast for too long, or how you've been avoiding something that needs your attention.

Sometimes the fog lifts suddenly—you're drinking coffee one morning and everything just clicks back into place. Other times it fades so gradually you only realize it was gone when you find yourself fully present again, feeling the warmth of the coffee cup or laughing at a joke without that layer of glass between you and the experience.

Either way, you remember how it felt, this strange floating sensation. And maybe you understand a little better now that your consciousness is not a simple thing, that being human means sometimes feeling a bit untethered from yourself.

On your trip you read a short story in the New Yorker about a man who wakes up on an island with little in the way of memory. He’s not sure how he arrived or what he’s going there. A lot of nothingness ensues:

So his days passed: breakfast, a stroll across the island or a bus ride to the southern beach, lunch followed by an afternoon siesta in the shade of a seaside palm. By the time the shadows were lengthening on the sand, he could feel a panic stirring within him. The noise of the cicadas throbbed terribly in the trees. He strained into the unyielding depths where memory was meant to lie and understood that another day would pass without delivering any alteration in his condition. Then at last the hour would arrive for him to drink his beers, and as the possibility of sleep arose, so sounded faint chords of hope.

But every morning, in those obscure beats by which the light and solidity of day replace the liquid remnants of dream, the reality of his situation would return to him and drain his heart of any comfort sleep had brought. The full weight of his confusion, the blank impenetrable wall between him and the past, and his anticipation of the long hours ahead would settle on him so oppressively he sometimes pounded his head with his fists.

This is how it feels for me. Not quite as dramatic as the man on the island—I still have my memories and know where I am—but that sense of watching time pass while feeling oddly separated from it.

And yet I keep making plans. Because I know from experience that this fog eventually lifts, that the world becomes vivid again, and that when it does, I'll want to have charted some kind of course forward.

So in the next post I'll share those plans with you. For now, I just wanted to tell you about this other part too. 💚