Emotional exile is the experience of being cut off from your own interior life — not through numbness but through something older, a fundamental disconnection from the ability to locate, name, and inhabit what you feel. You know feelings are happening somewhere. The access to them is restricted. You are in exile from yourself.

Anonymous thoughts about emotional exile posted here are from people who experience this distance — the honest account of living at a remove from the interior life that is theoretically yours.