My mind makes tiny things feel fatal

Dear Delyara, A delayed text. A weird cough. A school email. A missed call. A shift in somebody’s tone. None of those things should be big on their own. In my body, they arrive like alarms. By the time I know the facts, my heart has already pounded, my stomach has already dropped, my mind has already built a whole private disaster and moved furniture into it. I’m exhausted by how quickly I go there. People say, “Don’t overthink.” I wish that was how this worked. It’s not overthinking. It’s over-feeling before the facts even show up. And then I have to recover from something that often wasn’t even real.