Starved of Life: How Ignoring Our Hungers Kills Happiness
It doesn’t always happen with a bang.
Sometimes it happens so slowly you hardly notice.
The silent starvation of your senses.
The slow fading of your reflection.
The quiet death of your aliveness behind a polished, functioning exterior.
I know, because I lived it.
Before my life cracked open, I was living in rural England — married, raising a child, ticking the right boxes — but it wasn’t a “quiet” life.
There were flashes of wildness.
There were parties, laughter, nights where the rules bent a little — spaces where I could taste freedom and aliveness.
But those sparks weren’t enough to feed the deeper hungers.
My days still blurred together without meaningful structure.
My invisible illness drained my body and dulled my energy.
My partner, drowning in his own stresses, became emotionally distant.
Family connections thinned to strained, surface-level check-ins.
And then Covid came and so did home schooling and 24/7 marriage.
The parties stopped (well almost)
The little escape hatches slammed shut.
Rural life, already isolated, became a sealed-off world. No faces. No touch. No newness.
The silence wasn’t peaceful. It was suffocating.
I wasn’t just tired. I was emotionally starving.
And like so many, I didn’t even realise it — until something (or someone) lit a spark.
A new conversation. A different mirror.
Suddenly, I remembered what it felt like to be seen, to be alive, to matter.
It wasn’t about betrayal.
It was about resuscitation.
Transactional Analysis (TA) names this clearly:
Humans need stimulus, recognition, and structure — the psychological hungers — as much as we need food and oxygen.
When those needs go unmet for too long, we don’t just feel a bit low.
We start to vanish.
It can happen inside a marriage.
It can happen inside singleness.
It can happen even when life looks “interesting” from the outside.
Signs You’re Quietly Starving (Whatever Your Relationship Status)
You feel bored and restless, but can’t explain why.
You ache to be touched — not just physically, but emotionally.
You forget what genuinely lights you up
You fantasise about escape — not necessarily romance, just freedom.
You wonder if you’re selfish for wanting more.
You feel lonelier in company than you do on your own.
5 Ways to Protect Your Aliveness
1. Feed Your Senses First.
Seek beauty, movement, ideas, adventure.
Don’t wait for someone else to reawaken you. Find a passion project, volunteer, create.
2. Demand (and Offer) Real Recognition.
Beyond logistics and surface niceties.
Ask to be seen — and see others properly too. Have conversation with people who currently are not seeing you in the way you want or deserve to be seen. That could be a manager, family, friends or partners.. maybe all of the above.
3. Own Your Structure.
Build personal rituals, goals, and milestones that matter to you.
4. Speak the Loneliness Early.
To yourself. To someone you trust.
Don’t let it rot unspoken inside you.
5. Stay Fiercely Awake in Your Own Skin.
Keep becoming. Keep reaching.
Don’t apologise for craving a life that stirs every nerve ending.
If this hit something inside you — you’re not broken. You’re waking up.
I’d love to hear your reflections.
Have you ever caught yourself slowly fading out of your own life?
What brought you back to yourself?
Leave a comment, share your story, or pass this piece to someone who might be quietly starving without even knowing it.
Your voice matters — and when we speak our hidden truths, we rebuild our lives from the inside out
Masks off - let’s go
Jemma Hardélle
Therapist. Rebel soul. Survivor. Writer of inconvenient truths.Masks off - let’s go
Jemma Hardélle
Therapist. Rebel soul. Survivor. Writer of inconvenient truths.