Most poems about pain try to describe it. Olivia Taylor's "What Am I Supposed To Feel?" attempts something harder: describing the absence of feeling. The speaker is numb and confused, and cannot say whether the numbness is a flaw, a defence, or a sign that something fundamental is missing. The central idea is that self-protection can turn into self-erasure. The wall built to keep the world out has also shut out everything the speaker might have felt.
The poem begins with a shrug and a confession: "What can I say except I don't know?" That is an unusual way to open. Nothing is explained, no scene is set, and the speaker offers uncertainty in place of an argument. The next lines try to explain anyway, and they are worth reading closely: "It's the way I'm built / It's the way I protected myself." The repeated "It's the way" makes the speaker sound like someone listing facts about a machine. The tenses are revealing, too. "I'm built" is present and fixed, while "protected" is past. Something was done long ago, and its consequences are still running. The poem never says what the speaker needed protection from, and that silence seems deliberate. The focus stays on the result, not the cause.
The central image is the wall: "A wall between the world and I." A wall is usually a sensible thing to build, and the poem lets us feel that logic before it turns on the speaker. The grammar is also slightly off, since "me" would be the standard choice after "between." Whether that is a slip or a choice, it fits the idea. The "I" sits at the centre of the sentence, boxed in on one side by the wall and on the other by itself. Together, "built" and "wall" give the speaker a construction-site vocabulary. This is a self assembled from parts, which explains the next question: "Am I even human at this point?" A person who feels nothing starts to wonder whether feeling is what makes someone a person.
The word "know" runs through the first half of the poem like a pulse: "I don't know," "let me know," "I don't know how to live." The speaker is looking for information, as if the right answer could be handed over by someone else. The line "Please just let me know" is the poem's only direct plea and its most exposed moment. It is addressed to no one in particular, which makes it more affecting. Then the vocabulary shifts from "know" to "feel," as the speaker moves from not understanding to not experiencing. "I don't even feel anything anymore" is followed by the poem's shortest line, "Nothing at all." The full stop there works like a door closing.
The poem has no rhyme and no regular metre. The lines are short, plain and close to speech, with a casual "Cause" and a deflated "Well." This suits the subject. A polished, musical poem about numbness would feel dishonest, and the flatness here is part of the meaning. The ending shows this best. After the question "What am I supposed to feel?" comes a list: "Pain, love, happiness or maybe sadness." The list is strangely even, with no ranking between good and bad emotions. The word "maybe" before "sadness" suggests the speaker is guessing at what feelings are called. The phrase "supposed to" hints at a script that everyone else seems to have been given. The final line, "Well, I don't feel any of those things," is the longest in the poem and the least poetic, and it lands as an anticlimax. There is no breakthrough and no comfort.
There is also a quiet paradox. A speaker who claims to feel nothing writes with real urgency, through the questions, the "Please," and the fear of not knowing how to live. The poem never says so, but the desperation on the page seems to contradict the numbness it describes. Whether that counts as hope is left to the reader.
The poem matters because it is honest about a state that is easy to overlook. Numbness makes little noise, and it is often harder to put into words than sadness or anger. By refusing to dramatise it or tie it up neatly, Taylor gives readers who have felt "nothing at all" a voice that sounds like their own.