you built the life. 

the career. the relationship. the home that looks exactly the way you planned it. the schedule that runs like a machine. the wardrobe that says "i have my life together" without saying it too loudly. the body that is maintained. the reputation that is managed. the whole thing, from the outside, is extraordinary. and somewhere inside all that extraordinary, you went quiet. the kind of quiet that doesn't alarm anyone because you're still functioning. still showing up. still performing at the level everyone expects. the kind of quiet that only you can hear, and even you have learned to talk yourself out of noticing it. 
you used to feel things more. you used to notice things. the weight of sunlight on your arm. the way a song could rearrange your whole body before your brain caught up. the way a meal could be an event, not a task. the way getting dressed used to be a conversation between you and your own skin instead of a calculation about what the day required. 
you don't remember when it stopped. there was no single moment. it was a series of very small trades, each one rational, each one rewarded, each one removing one more layer of sensation from your daily life and replacing it with efficiency. 
i am a burlesque performer, a singer, a cultural critic, and a woman who has spent years studying what happens when women trade aliveness for optimization. and here is what i can tell you: the numbness you're feeling is not a malfunction. it is the system working exactly as designed. the system taught you to be useful. to show up, produce, manage, perform. and somewhere in the process of becoming so useful to every structure you operate inside, the career, the household, the partnership, the social world, your body learned to stop doing the things that aren't useful. wanting. feeling. taking up space. making noise. those don't serve the system. so the system trained them out of you. and the training was so effective you experience it as personality. 
you say "i'm just not that sensual" the way you might say "i'm just not that tall." as if it's a fixed trait. it's not. it's a learned absence. you were sensual once. you were spontaneous once. you were the woman who moved her hips in the kitchen without thinking about it, who laughed at the volume her body produced instead of the volume the room permitted, who wore the thing that felt good against her skin instead of the thing that felt appropriate for the context. 
that woman didn't leave. she went underground. and the numbness you're feeling is the distance between the woman you perform every day and the woman who is still in there, waiting for permission to surface. there is a neuroanatomist named jill bolte taylor who mapped four distinct characters inside the brain. four groups of cells, each generating a different way of being in the world. the one that went quiet in many women, the one that is playful, spontaneous, sensually experiential, body-aware, and sees the body as something to be enjoyed rather than maintained, is neurologically real. she has cells. she has circuits. she didn't vanish. she was told to sit down. the good news: she comes back online faster than you think. 
i built a self-guided workshop called showgirl desire around this exact problem. it's for the woman who optimized everything except her own aliveness. ten chapters drawing from burlesque tradition, feminist history, neuroscience, and embodiment practices. not therapy. not self-help. not another optimization strategy wearing a softer font. a practice for feeling alive in your body again. but you don't need to buy anything right now. start with this: 
i wrote a chapter called "the respectability bargain." it names the deal you made without knowing it, the one where you traded your desire, your appetite, your volume, your hunger for the right to be taken seriously. it traces who decided the price. and it introduces the woman the deal was designed to prevent. 
it's free. download it here 
read it when you have twenty minutes and a quiet room. if you recognize yourself in it, the numbness will start making sense. and sense is where the renegotiation begins.