I can feel stress living in my body now

Dear Delyara, It is no longer just a thought. It’s in my jaw in the morning before I’ve spoken. It’s in the tightness across my shoulders by midday. It’s in the way loud sounds reach me too fast by evening. It’s in the way I startle more easily now, the way my heart races over messages, the way I feel touched out by ordinary family life before dinner has even finished. That’s what scares me. The physicality of it. Stress used to feel like something happening around me. Now it feels like somewhere I live. And the worst part is how functional I still look while carrying it. I still go to work. I still answer. I still smile. I still remember the forms and wash the uniforms and make the phone calls. From the outside, I am coping. Inside, my body is behaving like it has been at war for longer than it can politely hide. I don’t know how to keep living like this without hardening in ways I don’t want to harden.