I Didn’t Re-Read the Text

Dear Delyara, Usually that’s how the spiral starts. I send something and then go back into it fifteen times — tone-checking, panic-checking, looking for invisible mistakes, trying to predict the other person’s emotional weather from punctuation and timing and word choice like my peace depends on decoding it first. This time I sent the text and put my phone in the other room. I walked around the house twitchy for twenty minutes. Then it got easier. Then I realized something I did not want to admit: re-reading isn’t caution for me. It’s self-punishment disguised as responsibility. I’m tired of giving anxiety that much real estate. Yesterday I took a little of it back.