Missing someone creates intense physical sensations in my heart

By David McElroy · December 26, 2015

It starts out as a vague discomfort. Your brain knows something is wrong in your body and there’s an immediate running monologue in your head.

What’s wrong? I can’t tell what’s wrong.

Maybe your heart beats a little faster. There’s a gnawing in your chest. There’s discomfort in your gut. It’s almost as though there’s something inside you with an urgent voice of its own.

What’s going on? Someone tell me what’s going on.

But you have no answer for the voice. You’re confused. You don’t know what you need. You don’t know what’s wrong. You just feel a growing sense of dread and panic. The sensations in your body are growing more urgent.

What do I need? Am I hungry? I must be hungry. I need something. What do I need?

The feeling of missing someone can create incredibly intense physical sensations in your heart and in your gut. The discomfort usually starts in the gut, but sometimes it starts higher — in the chest around the heart. It all works together, but you’re not even sure what’s going on. You end up guessing.

This is about her, isn’t it? Why am I thinking about her? Was I thinking about her or something else?

Some people say, “This is why I drink.” For me, this is why I eat ice cream. It’s a feeling of hunger — an intense, pulsating hole inside that must be filled. It’s a need for love — for acceptance, for home, for everything that feels like the place and the person I’ve been craving.

Some people say it’s a need for God. I’ve heard a lot of misguided rhetoric about how such deep yearning can only be the desire for communion with God. But in the same way that humans have a need for food and water and shelter, we also have other physical, emotional and psychological needs that go beyond any need for spiritual nourishment. All those needs are real, but they’re different needs that require different things.

Why does this hurt? How can I make it stop hurting?

For me, I can almost taste a person — not like tasting skin, but there’s the odd sense of tasting a presence, tasting a voice, tasting love, tasting mutual need. Tasting companionship. And tasting it hurts, because it screams out the desperate desire for something which isn’t there.

You keep hearing voices, not in the sense of thinking someone is there and you need to be locked up by men in white coats. You know it’s the need talking. You know the need is like a scared child screaming its old, unfulfilled need. The sensations in your body are urgent.

It’s a hunger that grows and eats at you.

Make it stop hurting!

It’s not rational. It’s not a conscious decision. It’s a need that won’t go away — a hole that’s opened inside your heart — craving, needing, begging. It’s a hunger.

Is this depression? Am I depressed? Is this about her or am I going crazy?

Why do we write songs about missing loved ones? Why do we make all sorts of art about lost love — and of finding it again?

Writer Edna St. Vincent Millay wrote in a letter, “Where you used to be, there is a hole in the world, which I find myself constantly walking around in the daytime, and falling in at night. I miss you like hell.”

That’s what it’s like. There’s a hole you try to avoid where something — someone — ought to be. It’s hard to avoid the hole. It’s hard to pretend it’s not there. Pretending can’t last long.

Why does this make me feel so crazy? How can I make this stop?

When people don’t know how to fill needs, they frequently fill those inner holes with unhealthful things. Some people get drunk. Some people go looking for any sex they can find. Some people gamble. Others use all sorts of recreational drugs.

For me, it’s sugar. That’s how I self-medicate. It deadens the voice. It temporarily kills the feelings. As I pour food into my body, I’m filling a hole — temporarily, but it’s all I know how to do.

Afterward, I feel shame for giving in to eating something that I know will make me feel terrible, make me gain weight, zap my energy, destroy my ability to sleep, deaden ambition and cause my joints to hurt. It causes me to feel physically and mentally terrible, but when I’m in the grip of that child-life voice, I turn to something familiar — because I must deaden the feelings.

I used to think I was the only one who went through this horrible pattern that seems to overwhelm life for awhile, but I’ve discovered others who admit — usually with feelings of shame — that they experience the same thing.

I don’t know yet how to make the feelings go away, how to get rid of the fear and the dread, how to fill the hole that doesn’t seem to want to be filled.

I’ll fight it. Eventually, I’ll beat it. I’ll find a way to fill the need permanently. I know I will.

In the meantime, I’ll continue a horrible struggle that few understand — in ways that make me feel that I’ve temporarily lost my mind.

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If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

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