If you stand between someone and the thing that wants to hurt them, you are not being brave. You are what dissociation was meant to be but couldn't be.

There is a feeling that many people carry their entire lives without ever having a word for it. It is not sadness. Sadness has weight and texture; and direction. It is not numbness. Numbness implies a turning off, a cessation. What this sensation is sits between and beneath both of those, a hollow awareness: the quiet, relentless knowing that emotional depth and genuine connection exist somewhere, just beyond reach.