The Cost of Living in Your Head

There is something nobody tells you about being an analytical person: you can process an experience so thoroughly that you miss it entirely.

Processing can function as a substitute for feeling, in the same way that insight can function as a substitute for change. It produces the sensation of engaging with something while keeping it at a manageable distance. The distance isn't malicious. It's usually protective. For a lot of people, developing an analytical relationship to their own experience was the thing that made difficult experiences survivable. The head became the place you went when things were too much.

The problem is that protective strategies have a way of generalizing. Eventually it's just the way you're in the world — slightly removed from it, watching it, understanding it, but not quite in it.