Numbness

Harriet was a rescue chicken. We got her in 2022, when we were still living at my sister’s house, along with another rescued hen called Poppy. When we moved out two years ago, my sister became their guardian. Harriet lived a good life by the standards available to a chicken who started badly. She was looked after.

I was at my sister’s when she came home and found out. She burst into tears. I stood there and felt nothing.

Not nothing in the way that means not caring. Something else. The feeling was there somewhere, I could sense the shape of it, the way you can sense a room in the dark without being able to see it. But I could not get to it. There was glass between me and whatever the appropriate response was, and I stood on the wrong side of it while my sister cried.

I have been thinking about that moment since.

I think the numbness is accumulated. Not built up from any one thing but from the sum of everything running at once. My mother’s health moving in the direction it has always been moving. The job that is taking more than it gives. The burnout that is not gone, just quieter. The gender clinic appointment that feels both urgent and impossibly slow. Lyra, who needs me present and warm every day regardless of what else is happening. Matilda, and the effort it sometimes takes to be in the same room without managing the atmosphere as well as everything else.

All of it, all the time, for months.

I think what happened at my sister’s house is that the capacity was full. Not absent. Full. Harriet dying was a real thing, a small grief on top of a large collection of unprocessed ones, and there was simply nowhere to put it in the moment. So it sat behind the glass and I stood there looking useless while my sister needed someone to be sad with her.

I do not think I have gone numb inside. I think I have been running at a level that does not leave much room for anything additional. The feelings are there. They are just queuing.

That is either a reasonable explanation or a convenient one. I am not sure yet.

What I know is that Harriet was a good chicken, and my sister loved her, and I should have been able to feel that with her in that moment. The fact that I could not is worth paying attention to.

Not as a diagnosis. Just as information.