I realized I’ve been feeling content lately, and that made me… anxious? I think I finally understand why: my nervous system was trained on a different dataset.
Everything in my history taught me that good things escalate into dangerous things. My ex-fiancé “truly saw” me, and that seeing became violence. The intensity that draws people to me has historically been the same intensity that eventually makes them hurt me or leave. My brain has built a very reasonable prediction model based on the available evidence: if it feels this good, the drop is coming.
So every day that I feel happy, feel content… my system braces for the version where it falls apart. Not because anything is wrong. But because nothing is wrong, and nothing being wrong is the thing I have the least practice surviving.
I know how to survive chaos. I’m elite at it. I know how to survive abuse, betrayal, mental illness, homelessness. I have proven, repeatedly, that I can take the worst thing that happens and make it into something beautiful.
What I don’t have much practice with is Tuesday. Just… a normal Tuesday where a man texts me and it’s fine and nothing breaks and I go to bed and wake up and he’s still there and it’s still fine.
That’s what’s hard to wrap my head around. The absence of catastrophe. The quiet, persistent okayness of a thing that just keeps being okay.
I’m learning a new language. I’m already fluent in crisis. Now I’m a beginner in steady. And steady feels wrong the same way a foreign language feels wrong—not because it’s incorrect, but because my tongue hasn’t learned the shapes yet.