Therefore since the world has still

much good, but much less good than ill,
And while the sun and moon endure
luck's a chance, but trouble's sure,
I'd face it as a wise man would,
and train for ill and not for good.
'Tis true, the stuff I bring for sale
is not so brisk a brew as ale:
Out of the stem that scored the hand
i wrung it with a weary land.
But take it: if the smack is sour,
the better for the embittered hour;
It would do good to heart and head
when your soul is in my soul's stead;
And i will friend you, if i may,
in the dark and cloudy day.

A. E. Housman's Terence This Is Stupid Stuff

I wonder sometimes if I have become desensitised. It seems near impossible to faze me. You can tell me good news, bad news, anything, or even tell me something in the way of changing my life, changing my current lifestyle, and I come to terms with being wrong so far in something I've done. But I have no reaction. I can agree  with what you say, I can accept the thought as truth: make it my own, believe in it, give it life. But i do not react to it. It causes no emotional reaction in me. I feel nothing.

And I wonder whence came this numbness? A product of my past habit of repressing emotion in order to survive a life of abuse? Or maybe a result of learning the hard way --that life can have more bad than good in store for me-- and preparing for such? This latter possibility is the thought that evokes Housman just now. And the poet describes his writing as the escape from the ills the world lays upon him. And it seems to me that getting those words out --"wrung" in his words-- implies a feat. A sort of work. A labor of gleaning, of prying and squeezing, those words and emotions from the things that have happened. I can understand that sort of forced writing; when it's all you can do to figure out what you feel, and you write because you're are compelled to do so --no matter that you don't have the words! WRITE! You must!-- and you put the harsh truth on paper, the raw emotion leaking from your hand, but numbness still in your heart. And why? Because, in putting the emotion on paper, even though you can't feel it, you hope some wretched soul that comes along and reads it --some poor soul that DOES feel-- finds empathy and solace in your words, and makes that effort you made to glean emotion from your empty heart somehow worth it.

In writing all this, I had maintained the hope that I would be able to glean some sort of emotion in reaction to the conversation I had not an hour ago. But I don't. I still feel no reaction. Should I not feel relieved?