How one teenager got through anything without ever really feeling it

Waiting for a phone call that might never come, sitting in a motel room while his mother lay sedated and cursing at invisible enemies, sixteen-year-old Augusten Burroughs figured out a trick that got him through nearly everything that followed: he stopped living in the present and started living slightly ahead of it.

He describes it directly. Sitting through another crisis, another hospitalization, another fight that might end in someone getting hurt, he noticed that if he asked himself "what will happen next" instead of feeling what was happening right now, the fear lost most of its grip. He compares himself, without exaggeration, to a doctor working an emergency room, someone who has to block out emotion completely just to keep functioning through whatever comes through the door next.

It worked, in the sense that it let him keep functioning. He sat through his mother's psychotic breaks, a staged suicide attempt, a relationship with an adult man twice his age, a household that regularly required someone to be talked out of hurting themselves or someone else, and he kept getting up, keeping his hair combed, showing up for the next thing. The cost showed up elsewhere. He describes moments of real danger and hurt with a striking flatness, and at one point admits outright that he tries not to think too hard about how alone he is, because he isn't sure he could climb back out if he let himself feel it fully.

That's the shape of the trade. Projecting yourself into the next hour instead of sitting in this one is a genuinely useful emergency tool, the kind that gets people through waiting rooms, layoffs, and funerals without falling apart on the spot. The trouble is that a habit built for emergencies doesn't always know when the emergency is over. Used constantly, it stops being a bridge to the next moment and starts being a permanent distance from this one, and the feelings that got skipped over don't disappear, they just wait.

Notice the next time your mind jumps straight to what happens after this instead of letting you feel what's happening right now, and recognize that move for what it is, a genuine survival skill, not a flaw. Let yourself use it on purpose when you're actually in a crisis that requires you to keep functioning, a hospital room, a hard conversation, a deadline. But set yourself a limit on it, an evening, a week, a conversation with someone you trust, where you go back and actually feel what you skipped past, because that debt does eventually come due. Check in with your body on a regular basis, not just when things are falling apart, and if you can't remember the last time you let yourself feel something fully, treat that as information rather than a badge of toughness.