My mind turns neutral things into warnings Dear Delyara,

Dear Delyara, That’s what anxiety does to me most often. It takes neutral things and sharpens them. A pause in someone’s reply becomes danger. A shift in tone becomes rejection. A forgotten detail becomes proof I’m slipping. A quiet room becomes a place where something bad is about to enter. An ordinary body sensation becomes a possible problem I need to solve immediately. By the time reality catches up, I’m already tired from surviving the version of it my anxious mind invented first. I wish people understood how exhausting false alarms can be when they go off all day long.