We Call It Moving On When It’s Really Just Numbing

We Call It Moving On When It’s Really Just Numbing
They told me I was doing well.
“You’ve moved on,” they said, like it was a medal I’d earned, like survival was proof of healing.
I nodded when they said it. I smiled, even. Smiling is easy when you’ve learned how to hollow yourself out just enough to make room for it.
From the outside, it looked convincing. I went back to work. I answered messages. I laughed at the right moments. I posted photos that suggested progress—coffee cups, sunsets, neutral captions that meant nothing and everything at once. I stopped crying in public. I stopped crying at all, actually. That’s when people became most impressed.
What they didn’t see was the way my chest felt quieter than it should have. Not peaceful—just muted. Like someone had turned the volume knob down on my life and misplaced it somewhere between “tolerable” and “numb.”
We call that moving on.
Real grief is inconvenient. It’s loud. It disrupts schedules and makes people uncomfortable. It asks for patience when the world is in a hurry. Numbing, on the other hand, is tidy. It fits neatly into routines. It doesn’t scare anyone. You can numb yourself and still be productive, still be polite, still be praised for your resilience.
So I learned how.
I learned how to stop expecting things. How to stop reaching too far emotionally, because reaching requires the possibility of being met—or worse, being disappointed. I learned how to keep conversations light, how to avoid memories that might crack something open. I learned which songs to skip, which streets to avoid, which thoughts to shut down mid-sentence.
I told myself this was strength.
There’s a strange comfort in emotional anesthesia. When you feel nothing, nothing can hurt you. Loss loses its sharpness. Love loses its risk. Everything flattens into a manageable sameness. You wake up, you go through the motions, you sleep. Days stack on top of each other like blank pages you don’t have to write on.
People say time heals, but time doesn’t heal on its own. Time just passes. What you do inside it matters. And what I did was freeze.
I didn’t miss you the way I used to. That was the first sign something was wrong.
At first, the absence was unbearable. You were everywhere—songs, habits, inside jokes that ambushed me at random. I carried you like a weight I couldn’t put down. Then one day, I noticed I hadn’t thought about you for hours. Then days. Then weeks. Everyone congratulated me for that too.
But forgetting isn’t the same as healing. Forgetting is just another form of disappearance.
The truth is, I didn’t move forward. I stepped sideways into emotional neutrality and called it progress. I replaced pain with distance, grief with distraction. I stayed busy. Busy enough to outrun my own thoughts. Busy enough to never sit still long enough for feeling to catch up.
We mistake functionality for wellness in a world that rewards performance. If you’re still showing up, still producing, still smiling on command, no one asks what it costs you internally. No one asks what parts of yourself you’ve had to silence to stay acceptable.
Numbing is quiet self-betrayal.
It’s choosing not to feel joy too deeply because joy reminds you how far you can fall. It’s choosing not to love fully because love once took too much from you. It’s surviving by shrinking your emotional range until life fits inside something you can control.
I told myself I was protecting my heart. What I was really doing was starving it.
There were moments—small, inconvenient ones—when the numbness cracked. A laugh that lingered too long. A memory that slipped through my defenses. A sudden wave of sadness with no obvious trigger. Those moments scared me more than the pain ever did. Because pain meant I still cared. Pain meant I wasn’t as gone as I pretended to be.
So I pushed those moments away too.
People don’t warn you that numbing comes with side effects. That when you dull the pain, you dull everything else along with it. That sunsets look the same but feel emptier. That connections feel thinner. That you can’t selectively shut down parts of your heart without consequences.
I started to feel like a guest in my own life—present, but not fully participating. Watching instead of experiencing. Existing instead of living.
And still, everyone kept saying I’d moved on.
Moving on is supposed to feel like growth. Like expansion. Like learning how to carry what hurt you without letting it define you. Numbing feels like contraction. Like making yourself smaller so the world can’t hit you as hard.
I didn’t want to admit that, because admitting it meant acknowledging I was still afraid. Afraid to feel deeply again. Afraid that if I let myself feel, everything I’d buried would come rushing back all at once.
But healing isn’t about avoiding pain forever. It’s about learning how to feel it without letting it consume you.
I’m not there yet. I won’t pretend I am.
Some days, the numbness still feels safer than the alternative. Some days, I miss the quiet it gave me. But I’m starting to recognize that safety and stagnation can look a lot alike. That just because something doesn’t hurt doesn’t mean it’s healthy.
So I’m learning—slowly, clumsily—to feel again. To sit with discomfort instead of anesthetizing it. To let joy be risky. To let grief be honest. To stop calling emotional shutdown “moving on” just because it makes other people more comfortable.
Maybe moving on isn’t about forgetting or numbing or proving how okay you are.
Maybe it’s about letting yourself be fully human again—even when that hurts.