Apathy

In my humanities majors, I was taught to notice trends, extremely helpful in any humanity major. I have also been able to notice trends in my own life, and one characteristic of the season that I am in now is the grace of an acute self-awareness: God has been making many things apparent to me about myself that I did not know. One of these things I have been searching for for years.
Over the past two years I have noticed a startling and very unfortunate trend in my life: desensitization. I have noticed that many things that used to affect me simply no longer do. I had been noticing myself getting tired more and the things that I saw, that I did, that I sang, that I read, that I prayed, the people I saw and listened to and loved, none of these things affected me the same. It was as if I had been becoming desensitized to them. I cried less the past two years (which believe it or not is actually not a good thing), and I just felt more checked out of life. I sometimes felt like this manifested in lower love for people, decreased ability to feel emotion, or some other way that I felt just...less than I used to be. This was most noticeably evident in my faith; my prayers had become more mundane, my worship was no longer tearful, tear-jerking, and overall I just cared less, about everything. I noticed these trends, and they hurt. I doubt anybody else noticed them, only occasionally did people say, "You haven't really seemed like yourself lately," which I could always chock up to misinterpretation or increased fatigue. But I noticed it a lot this year, it felt like my drives were not as fired up, and while I was still growing, a lot, there was something off. Songs that used to bring me to tears, like John Mark McMillans How He Loves Us hardly had any affect on me. I hid this all very well, yet it was always, always in the back of my mind, occasionally pushing its way to the front to taunt me. At times I thought it spiritual attack, other times I just felt overwhelmed with inquiries about if I was still the same person. And all I heard from God on it was to trust Him with everything, to seek first His Kingdom and His righteousness and He would take care of everything else, and He had, always. The weird thing about it always was that I did not understand my own depravity or God's own goodness any less, I actually understood those tenants more, yet it still felt like those truths were not pushing me like they used to. Eventually I learned to ignore these things as the business of life and the need to keep going shoved these thoughts much further back in my mind.
Lately though, I have noticed my life described perfectly by Paul's words in Romans 7: "18b For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. 19 For I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing. 20 Now if I do what I do not want to do, it is no longer I who do it, but it is sin living in me that does it." I have noticed another trend lately, a lack of desire, a decreased drive, the usual trend and hurts, just a dull, frightening, numbness. And finally today, after years of searching, bandaging, thinking more programs or a better understand of myself would be the answer, after thinking this was the new me, after near despair, I believe that God has given me the answer: I am apathetic.
I realized today that there is a part of me that just does not care, about anything. It is why it is so hard for me to be good, hard for me to be selfless, to not be lazy, because part of my soul has been rotting. I am still trying to figure out why, and I do not know. Perhaps it is due to stuff buried very deep, I'm sure part of it is poison that this culture has dealt me. But the simple reality is that part of me just does not care, about God, about my life, about the numerous people I Love, about doing what I am supposed to. It hurts me, but it makes so much sense; this part of me has flared up to various degrees and frequencies over the past couple of years. It ultimately puts a limit on how well I will know my God, and how much I will serve Him. This relatively small part of me shapes the character I have and the good I want to do. And I hate it. I wish that there is just some internal switch that I could flip and once again the fullness of who I am would care. I am nearly in tears writing this, and I am not fully sure what to do with this information, except pray, finally knowing exactly how to, finally with possession of the decrepit answer that I have been searching for for years. I feel like a certain part of my soul has been rotting away, and at least in part, affecting the rest of me. I feel my brokenness so tangibly today, and even now, I can feel this poison trying to work on me.
Again, I do not know what to do. I have a deep fear that this is not going to go away. That I will simply, sadly, be more aware of it. I have to trust God to take it away, or else my soul will continue to rot. At the very least, I know how to pray now, and I am confident that the month of August will be a busy, busy wrestling match. Life does not slow down in order to allow me to learn how to be effective again, life does not stop so that I may apply the antidote, so that I can let things affect me again. Oh, how I desire that, deeply, deeply.
Reader, if you have made it this far, I thank you. It means you really care about me. I do not understand this fully, but I know that I do not want to face this alone. I will be praying that things once again affect me, and that I learn to care, deeply, about the things I Love.
The start of the wikipedia article on apathy unfortunately describes me so well:
"Apathy (also called impassivity or perfunctoriness) is a state of indifference, or the suppression of emotions such as concern, excitement, motivation and passion. An apathetic individual has an absence of interest in or concern about emotional, social, spiritual, philosophical and/or physical life.
They may lack a sense of purpose or meaning in their life. An apathetic person may also exhibit insensibility or sluggishness. In positive psychology, apathy is described as a result of the individual feeling they do not possess the level of skill required to confront a challenge (i.e. "Flow"). It may also be a result of perceiving no challenge at all (e.g. the challenge is irrelevant to them, or conversely, they have learned helplessness)." I need to pray through the fear.