Do I feel without realising that I feel?

I have 2 emotions:  I call them  "fizzy"  and "still".  Like types of water. I find it really hard to identify anything else.   The fizzy emotion is a feeling that my brain is fizzy. If its a bad feeling then I'm frustrated, if its a positive feeling then I'm happy. When I'm not fizzing then I'm still, which translates to your "numb". Along with this i experience different amounts of nausea and headache in reaction to things.

Long before I was diagnosed this has always driven people mad.  "you're so passive!" "you're so indifferent!" "you're completely repressed!"

I find that emojis help a lot. Even in non written communication I sometimes think of the emoji I might use then try to vocalise it. Then again, I doubt whether anyone I interact with thinks that it's helpful at all. 

 Me neither!

I also sometimes think that I can be quite psychopathic in terms of my lack of feeling or expressing emotion. But yet I know that I’m not psychopathic, rather Autistic. 

I too feel bad if others are suffering but as you said, I am probably projecting how I would feel in that situation into them rather than feeling what they feel in that situation.

The more that I think about it the more I realise that I am absolutely clueless about my own emotions. There’s a lovely pretty emotion wheel in this link. ‘How’ is it even possible for humans to experience so many different emotions?!

www.simplemost.com/.../

Do you mean that you experience your life in ‘third person’ context? I sometimes have phases of speaking about myself in the third person, then people start saying they are worried about me! 
I always used to immediately think it was my fault if someone else did something horrible to me ‘what have I done?’ It’s taken many years and a lot of relearning how I look at things to realise that if someone else does something horrible the responsibility lays with them.

I sometimes used to get told that I looked miserable when I was in my early teens. I understand now that it was probably because my face was blank and not pulling any particular expression that others assumed that I was unhappy.

I tend to lose track of my thoughts if I’m stressed. For example Friday my 2 year old had a massive meltdown all while I was having to do the school run and go to Sainsbury’s so I was having to keep litlun contained in her buggy/car seat with my 5 year old who was alternating between being fed up with her sister screaming and laughing at her sister and navigating a busy school playground and then Sainsbury’s. I literally could not think straight for about an hour afterwards! To be fair I can usually identify when I am stressed out/irritated. That seems to be the extent of my emotion identification though, unless it’s extreme, then I’d extend it to happy/sad/angry.

I think that is the thing. Because we rely on our heads so much to interpret anything. We have to use our heads to understand our emotions rather than just feeling them and automatically knowing how we feel. It becomes a detective saga of sorts having to piece together various pieces of evidence such as physiological changes; behavioural changes etc to try to decipher how we are feeling! 
Many people seem to find meditation helpful. It’s been on my ‘to do’ list for several months now! I hope you find it helpful!

I've been thinking about this too recently. 

And I don't know how I feel about it... Lol. Seriously I don't know. 

It reminds me of how when I was a teenager I was convinced I might be a psychopath because apart from being very depressed generally, I didn't feel much else. I mean in between feeling overwhelmed. I don't know. I find a lot of things overwhelming, but I don't often know how to describe why I'm overwhelmed. I just know that I don't feel 'good' 

I rarely if ever recognise good feelings though, until I've gone back down to my normal mood (okay (possibly numb) or bad) and I'm looking back) 

The thing that made me realise I probably wasn't a psychopath is my interaction with non-human animals. 

And how much empathy I have for others. But some of that I've realised recently might not be so much empathy as such but projection. As in, I project how I think I would feel, have felt or reacted towards something and think the other person must be feeling that way too and drive myself crazy thinking about how bad they must feel. 

A lot has already been said here that mirrors my own experience. But I doubt that I could add much without repetition. So I'll just say thanks yet again, Kitsune, for raising an issue which is essential to many of us. For the last 2+ years i have been investigating why it is worth me bothering about my diagnosis. I have come up with several good reasons, but this issue must be amongst the most important for late diagnosees and self-identifiers. I was just looking at a piece of photojournalism about the Czech 'soft' revolution of 1989. It brought out a huge amount of emotion (as also did the Czech Spring, when I was really quite young, circa 67) And yet the times when I have shown as much emotion about my own family can almost be counted on one hand. (But they do happen!) As the lyrics of a John Cale song once put it, "I keep a close watch on this heart of mine"; in other words, I constantly pay attention to what it is that draws out such strong emotions; or what seemingly doesn't. But, it doesn't make it any easier to discuss emotions F2F. I have attempted to tell some of my family before that this is the case, and I imagine they do actually have their own evidence; but they haven't really yet told me so. But at least, I now have some quite convincing evidence for myself, beyond the more frequently mentioned issues in the text books.

I feel like an observer of my experiences, when I'm supposed to react to a situation I feel nothing until I am pulled out of that observation state then I become overwhelmed. 

I once was talking out side of my building ( wich is in the centre of town and very busy) to some people who had stopped by, and out of nowhere this guy turned the corner walked towards me and punched me right in the face I just stood there trying to figure out what I had done to him for him to act this way and it took at least 5 minutes for me to realise this guy just attached me. 

So I then chased him, if I had caught him he would of known not to hit anyone again, he had manage to lock himself behind his girlfriends front door and then a police car pulled up and the officers had asked what was going on I could not explain but luckily the people I was with could. 

The police then said I looked angry and that I may become violent I felt nothing at that time I thought how do I try to not look angry, to show I was not angry.  It was very bizarre, anyway turns out they knew his dad and that an apology would do he came out said sorry end of story.

I don't think there is an easy answer. I've been doing a lot of thinking about this myself recently and I've notice how "off kilter" my thoughts go if I'm stressed and I'm trying to draw the links at least for those negative emotions. But it is difficult to recognise this through thoughts alone, as how can you tell what is normal thoughts and what is your "self" trying to tell you something is wrong? I've also been looking in to meditation quite a lot recently and I'm going to start meditating in the hopes this improves things. What I've learnt about meditation is how thoughts are involuntary, but you can learn to react to thoughts or not. And it makes you more aware of the feelings and experiences within yourself. The way I've heard mediation described seems to correlate to what I already do to try and untangle my thoughts. I definitely think it's worth reading up about. 

I agree! Unless it's something really big, we don't register feeling an emotion. How does one recognise emotions when one doesn't feel them? I'm sure that somewhere there is a nice little self help book that details exactly how to do this! But do I really want to be aware of everything that I am feeling? That's actually quite a scary thought!

I think you're right. People say to me "you look happy" or "you look annoyed" or whatever, but I don't have a physical feeling of being any of those things, its comfortable "numb" I think you mention. So my guess is that we still are going through the emotions, but for whatever reason these aren't picked up by our consciousness unless its something truly monumental. There's a sort of "link" missing between our bodies experiencing the emotion and our consciousness registering it.