Hi all! I don't know if anyone here will remember me, but I used to be active on here a long time ago. The website says my last visit was June of 2019, if that gives you any indication. I'm honestly a little surprised the board's still here, though I'm glad. Anyway, I thought about posting this in "Introduce Yourself," but I'm honestly more interested in turning it into a discussion. My journey, both with life and dacryphilia, has been a bit hairy over the past few years, and I'm really curious if anyone else has had a similar experience. 

The last time I logged on, back in 2019, I would have been about halfway through veterinary school. Now, I am a creative, type B personality, and vet school isn't really the best fit for that kind of person. It's very intense, and it's actually a joke in the field that every veterinarian is type A. Additionally, I'm a fiction writer at heart; I had actually been torn between applying for vet school, which I'd thought about when I was a kid, and applying for an MFA in creative writing. I knew I wanted the MFA more, but I also knew that I was unlikely to actually get a job with it, whereas the veterinary field is always hiring, so it was more out of fear than love that I chose veterinary school. Needless to say, I was very unhappy in my vet school years, but I was also felt for a variety of reasons like dropping out wasn't an option, so I persisted. When I got to my clinical year, it completely destroyed me. I felt behind everyone else, and I was constantly in a state of panic. It felt like being on a game show where I had to devote all my time to it, and all day long, I was getting quizzed very publicly about things I felt like I knew less about than everyone around me. Long story short, it was a traumatic experience for me, and it affected me in ways I didn't even realize at the time. For years afterward, I experienced emotional flattening, where I pretty much exclusively felt anxiety or numbness. Consequently, I lost the ability to empathize easily with people, and it became very hard to relate to my partner in daily conversations. I also lost entire parts of myself. One example, which I tell people irl who ask, is that I stopped submitting short stories for publication for a whole year and completely forgot the positive responses my stories had been getting before that time. The other, perhaps more striking example that I've never been able to tell anyone before is that I actually forgot I had dacryphilia. Idk if it was the loss of empathy or the fact that I didn't have the emotional capacity to want to comfort others (my interest is mostly hurt/comfort-related) when I was in a state of constant anxiety and distress myself, but I didn't have a single dacryphilia-related thought for my entire clinical year, to the point where that part of me might as well have completely disappeared. Then, a few months after graduation, I was reading Firestarter by Stephen King and there was a scene where a man was somehow vulnerable (I think to the point of crying, but it was very brief) and I got the tinglies again and had a "What am I feeling right n--Oh, holy shit" moment because I suddenly remembered everything and realized how much of myself I had lost. 

It's been a few years since that moment, and I'm still not fully back to "normal." I used to imagine myself enacting hurt/comfort fantasies to fall asleep every night, and I only think to do it every once in a while now. It's funny, because I can remember how I used to feel such a desperate need for real-life obs and comforting experiences that I'd get really frustrated, and in those moments, I probably would have been happy to get rid of it all, but now that it's so subdued, I really miss feeling that strongly about something. It's also frustrating because I have a fiance now who my old self would have absolutely LOVED--frequent nightmares from PTSD that he needs comfort from in the middle of the night--and often, it won't actually trigger anything in me, when I used to fantasize about that exact situation all the time before. I do still react to crying/comforting stuff sometimes, but it's not as consistent as it used to be. I will add that my libido for more traditionally sexual things has also been much lower than it used to be, too, and even though the feeling I get from crying or h/c isn't exactly the same, I'm sure it's all connected. I saw a therapist for a few years who helped a lot with getting my positive emotions back, and I just started seeing a new therapist (I'm in a different state now) and am hoping to focus some on libido stuff with her, so I might bring this up as well at some point and see what happens, but I really wanted to talk about it on here, partly to explain my absence, but even more importantly to see if anyone else has experienced something like this before and find out if things ever came back (and what helped them come back if they did). 

Anyway, that's me. I'd love to hear people's thoughts! If nothing else, it's another interesting data point for our infrequently-researched little corner of the human condition.