Silent Alarms: When the Check Engine Light Never Comes On

There was a season in my life when I didn’t feel much of anything.

Not joy. Not sadness. Just… quiet. On paper, I was fine — working, laughing with friends, posting the occasional photo that said, “I’m good.” But inside, there was nothing. No spark. No signal. No alarm telling me I was slipping away from myself.

That’s the thing about emotional numbness — it’s the silence before the breakdown.

When you’ve been running on survival mode for too long, your system starts to adapt. Your body learns to protect you from pain by muting everything, even the good stuff. You stop crying not because you’re healed, but because you’ve stopped registering the impact. You stop feeling anxious because your mind has given up trying to keep up. You stop caring because caring hurts too much.

For many Black women, this emotional shutdown doesn’t look like collapse — it looks like control. We stay composed, polished, and productive because we’ve been conditioned to equate stillness with weakness. We don’t rest; we regulate. We don’t break down; we dissociate. And because there’s no visible warning light, nobody — sometimes not even we — can tell something’s wrong.

The Silent Alarms You Might Be Ignoring

When your check engine light doesn’t come on, these are the subtle ways your system may still be signaling distress:

🕯️ You feel detached from joy. Even the things that used to make you smile barely register now.
💭 You go through the motions. You’re doing life, but not really living it.
💤 You sleep a lot — or not at all. Rest doesn’t restore you; it just helps you disappear for a bit.
💔 You can’t remember the last time you cried — or felt deeply moved.
🧩 You disconnect from people who love you. Not because you don’t care, but because you don’t have the energy to.
🧘🏽‍♀️ You crave solitude, but it doesn’t bring peace. You’re isolated, not recharging.
📱 You fill silence with noise. Scrolling, working, cleaning, planning — anything but sitting still with yourself.
⚙️ You stay in control mode. You’d rather manage everything than feel anything.

If you see yourself here, you’re not broken — you’re protecting. This is what happens when the mind and body decide that feeling is too dangerous. But silence is not safety; it’s suppression.

Numbness is the body’s version of emergency mode — conserving energy to survive, not to thrive. It’s like a car quietly shutting down systems one by one to keep from overheating. You can still drive it for a while, but eventually the engine will stall.

If this sounds familiar, your lack of feeling isn’t proof of strength — it’s a sign that your system has been overloaded for too long. The goal isn’t to force emotion back, but to gently reconnect to what’s been buried underneath. Sometimes that starts with the smallest acts: a song that moves you, a walk that slows you down, a journal entry that surprises you with what spills out.

Your emotions aren’t your enemies — they’re your dashboard.

And when your check engine light never came on, it wasn’t because you were fine. It’s because you learned to drive without one.

It’s time to rewire your system so you can hear the signals again — even the soft ones that whisper, “You deserve to feel.”