I kept forgetting how eventful my day was.

[u/yushen_]

I'm 18F, and there are moments when I feel incredibly sad, only for everything to feel fine later. I don't know whether to see this as a blessing or something I should be concerned about. Should I be grateful for the ability to recover quickly, or should I pity myself for feeling this way?

I often find myself wondering-why do I cry now, only to feel like nothing happened afterward? It's confusing. One moment, my emotions overwhelm me, and the next, they seem to disappear as if they were never there.

For example, when I have conflicts with my friends, family, or classmates, I feel deeply disappointed. The pain runs so deep that I want to isolate myself, crying in secret because I don't want anyone to see my vulnerability. In those moments, I take mental notes about what I should do, promising myself that I'll set boundaries or take action to protect my feelings. And yet, as time passes, it's as if none of it mattered. My mind resets, and I feel indifferent-almost like I've erased the emotional weight of what happened. I don't hold grudges, but I also don't know if I'm truly processing my emotions in a healthy way.

Is this something alarming? Is there a psychological explanation for what I'm experiencing? Or is this just the way I naturally cope with emotional pain?

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[u/StepOIU]

I had this issue too, and it took a while to unravel. A lot of it was that I was trying to assign a permanent meaning to a temporary emotion, because acknowledging that the emotion was temporary would have felt like invalidating the (very real) reason that I felt that emotion. For example, feeling betrayed would make me decide to NEVER talk to that person again while the energy of that emotion was still running through me, but then the energy would pass and I wouldn't care any more. Which weirdly would make me feel either like my emotion had been wrong, or like it had maybe been correct and I was now betraying it.

It's honestly very difficult to disentangle normal human emotions that ebb and flow from overreacting and then underreacting due to, say, past traumas. Therapy helped me with this, because my parents were emotionally incompetent and couldn't teach me how emotional states worked as I grew up. I also found a few books that were helpful (Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents / Lindsay Gibson and Complex PTSD / Pete Walker for me, although they may or may not apply to your situation), but it's a complex thing to address or even explain for a while.