I can turn a delayed phone call into a whole emotional emergency on my own

Dear Delyara, The phone doesn’t ring when expected, and suddenly I’m building possibilities, rehearsing outcomes, preparing responses, calculating what it might mean, and feeling my body move into a state of private alarm over something that may turn out to be completely ordinary. That’s what anxiety steals from me most often: the space where uncertainty might have remained neutral until reality arrived to shape it. Instead, I fill it. Fast. Expensively. Invisibly. By the time the real call comes, I’m often already tired from all the versions of it I lived through alone.