My Highlight Time is a HiMoment column where real readers share the small, often unspoken moments of self-care, connection, and discovery that shaped them. Names have been changed to protect privacy.
Feeling Numb in Your 40s? How I Rediscovered Myself
By Robert, 42 — Nashville, TN
If you had asked me six months ago whether I was feeling numb in my 40s, I would have shrugged and said I was fine. That is the thing about going numb — you do not realize it is happening. You just wake up one morning and notice that nothing tastes like anything anymore, which is a problem when you are a chef and tasting things is literally your job. I had been running on muscle memory for months, maybe longer. Cooking the same stations, driving the same route, kissing my wife on the same spot on her forehead before falling asleep to the same show we had been watching for three seasons. I was not unhappy. I was just not anything.
It started on a Tuesday in October. I had just finished a double shift — lunch service bled into dinner, the way it always does when somebody calls out — and I came home to a dark house. My wife was already asleep. The dog barely lifted his head. I stood in the kitchen, still smelling like fryer oil and thyme, and I just stood there. Not tired, not wired, not hungry. Just hollow. I opened the fridge, closed it, opened it again. Like I was waiting for something in there to surprise me.
When Everything Runs on Autopilot
I should back up. I have been cooking professionally since I was nineteen. I loved it once — the chaos, the precision, the way a good sauce can make a grown man close his eyes. Somewhere around thirty-seven or thirty-eight, the love did not disappear so much as it flattened. The restaurant got busier, then it got quieter, then it got busy again, and all of it felt the same. My hands knew what to do without me. I became excellent at going through motions.
At home it was the same quiet erosion. My wife, Denise, and I have been together fifteen years. Good years, real years. But we had slipped into a script without noticing. Weeknight dinners were functional. Weekends were errands. We still laughed — she is genuinely the funniest person I know — but we had stopped surprising each other. We had stopped being curious about each other. I cannot tell you when exactly that happened, which is the whole point. It was so gradual that by the time I noticed, it felt permanent.
The numbness had crept into my body too. I do not mean anything was medically wrong. I mean that I had stopped paying attention to what I felt physically. Chefs are hard on their bodies — burns, sore feet, a back that has been complaining since 2014 — so you learn to tune sensation out. Turns out, when you spend years tuning out pain, you accidentally tune out everything else too. Pleasure, comfort, warmth, that particular looseness in your chest when someone touches you and you actually feel it. Gone. Dialed down to nothing.
The Night Something Cracked Open
That Tuesday, standing in front of the open fridge at eleven at night, I had a thought I had not had in a long time. I thought: I wonder what would happen if I tried something different.
Not something dramatic. I was not about to quit my job or book a flight somewhere. I just meant something small and unfamiliar. Something I had no script for.
A few weeks earlier, a buddy of mine had mentioned, almost as a joke, that he had bought a wellness device after his divorce. He said it half-laughing, the way men talk about anything that makes them feel exposed. But then he got quiet and said something that stuck with me. He said it was the first time in a year he remembered he was still a person with a body that could feel things. Not a provider, not an ex-husband, not a guy going through it. Just a body, awake and present.
I thought about that conversation for weeks without doing anything about it. But that Tuesday, something about the emptiness of the kitchen and the hum of the refrigerator made me pull out my phone and search. I did not know what I was looking for. I felt ridiculous. I am a forty-two-year-old man who spends his days yelling behind a line, and here I was at midnight browsing self-care products like I was solving a crossword puzzle I did not understand.
I ordered something from HiMoment. I will not go into detail because that is not really the point. The point is that clicking “buy” felt like the first deliberate choice I had made for myself in months. Not for the restaurant, not for the household, not because somebody needed something from me. For me, because I was curious.
Rediscovering Sensation After Years of Tuning Out
The package arrived on a Thursday. Denise was at work. I opened it in the bedroom feeling like a teenager sneaking something past his parents, which at forty-two is both absurd and kind of wonderful.
I am not going to narrate the experience itself. What I will say is that it was not what I expected. I expected it to feel transactional — push button, get result. Instead, what surprised me was how much I had to slow down. I had to pay attention. My body, which I had been ignoring for years unless it was in pain, suddenly had my full attention, and it turned out it had a lot to say.
There was a moment — and I know this sounds small — where I felt a warmth spread across my lower back, and I realized I had been clenching every muscle in my body for what might have been years. When I let go, actually let go, I felt something I can only describe as relief. Not dramatic, not cinematic. Just a long exhale after holding your breath so long you forgot you were holding it.
I lay there afterward and stared at the ceiling fan. I could hear the neighbor’s wind chimes through the cracked window. I could feel the cotton of the pillowcase against the back of my neck. These are not revelations. They are tiny, ordinary sensations that I had completely stopped registering. Being numb is not the absence of feeling. It is the absence of noticing.
What I Learned About Being Curious Again in Midlife
Here is what nobody tells you about going numb in your forties. It does not look like depression, not exactly. You still function. You still show up. You are a reliable employee, a decent husband, a guy who remembers to rotate the tires. From the outside, you look fine. From the inside, you are watching your own life through a window.
That one Tuesday — or really, the few weeks that followed — did not fix everything. I want to be honest about that. I did not suddenly become a different person. But something cracked open, the way a door cracks open when you thought it was painted shut. Just enough to let a draft through. Just enough to make you think: oh, there is something on the other side of this.
I started making small changes. I took a different route to work one morning and found a bakery I had never noticed. I cooked dinner at home for the first time in months — actually cooked, not just heated something up — and made a dish I had never attempted before. Saffron risotto, which is insane for a weeknight, but I wanted to stand in my own kitchen and be a beginner at something.
I told Denise about the device. Not right away — it took me about two weeks to figure out how to say it without feeling like I was confessing something. She was quiet for a moment, and then she said, “I think I want to try something too.” We did not have some big transformative conversation. She just looked at me the way she used to, back when we were still figuring each other out. Like I was someone she did not fully know yet.
That look. I had missed that look.
We have been more curious with each other since then. Not in any grand way. We ask more questions. We linger a little longer. Last Saturday she put on a record — Coltrane, which we used to listen to when we were first dating — and we just sat on the couch with the lights off and let the music fill the room. I put my hand on her knee, and she put her hand on mine, and I could feel it. I could actually feel it.
What Feeling Alive Again Actually Looks Like
I am still a chef. I still work doubles. My back still hurts. I am not going to pretend that one purchase and a few quiet evenings turned my life around. That is not how real life works, and I do not trust anyone who says it does.
But I am paying attention now. That is the shift. I am paying attention to the heat of the shower on my shoulders in the morning. To the weight of my dog when he puts his chin on my foot. To the way Denise smells like lavender lotion when she gets into bed. I am not just going through the motions anymore. Or maybe I am, but I am going through them with my eyes open.
The other day at work, I was tasting a broth — just a simple chicken stock, nothing fancy — and I caught myself closing my eyes. Not because it was transcendent. Because I wanted to actually taste it. I wanted to be in the moment of tasting it, not three tasks ahead in my mind.
My sous chef looked at me funny. “You good?” he asked.
“Yeah,” I said. “I think I actually am.”
That is my highlight time. Not a fireworks moment. Not a before-and-after. Just a Tuesday that made me curious enough to pay attention again, and all the small, accumulating Tuesdays since.
If you are feeling numb in your 40s, or your 30s, or your 50s — if you have been running on autopilot so long you forgot what it feels like to notice things — I am not going to tell you what to do. I am just going to say: get curious. About yourself, about your body, about the person sleeping next to you. Curiosity is a door. You do not have to know what is on the other side to turn the handle.
Have your own Hi-Moment to share? We’d love to hear it. Send your story to [email protected], or tag us on Instagram with #MyHighlightTime. You may also enjoy: How to Actually Relax When You’re Alone and After 18 Years, We Relearned Each Other. All submissions are anonymized and edited with care.
