I still brace hardest for things nobody has actually confirmed yet

Dear Delyara, A delayed call. An unusual symptom. A sentence like “Can we talk later?” A school email with no subject line. A letter on the mat from some official place. These are the kinds of things that can get into my body before they have any proper meaning attached to them. I don’t wait neutrally. I brace. That bracing feels so sensible in the moment, as if I am being practical and emotionally prepared. In reality, it steals an extraordinary amount of life from me. Whole afternoons can be lost to rehearsing, forecasting, and pre-feeling things that may never arrive in the form I imagined. This is what anxiety costs that people do not always see: not only distress, but wasted reality.