disorder
The spectrum of Mental Health disorders is incredibly vast; we showcase the multitude of conditions that affect mood, thinking and behavior.
The Psychology of Overthinking at Night
Every night, the same ritual: I turn off the lights, close my eyes, and within minutes, my mind transforms into a courtroom where I'm simultaneously the defendant, prosecutor, and judge—and I'm always found guilty. It's 2:47 AM, and I'm mentally replaying a conversation from three days ago. Not an important conversation. Not a fight or a confrontation. Just a casual exchange with a coworker where I said something that might have sounded stupid. Probably didn't. But might have. My mind dissects every word, every pause, every facial expression I can remember. What did she mean when she said "interesting"? Was that genuine interest or polite dismissal? Did I talk too much? Did I sound arrogant? Should I have asked more questions? Round and round the thoughts spiral, each loop adding new layers of anxiety, new evidence of my social incompetence, new reasons why everyone probably thinks I'm insufferable. By 3:30 AM, I've catastrophized that one unremarkable conversation into proof that I'm about to be fired, that I have no real friends, that I'm fundamentally unlikeable and everyone's just been too polite to tell me. By 4:00 AM, I'm mentally composing an apology email for something that probably didn't even register as awkward to anyone but me. This is my nightly reality. And I know I'm not alone. The Midnight Court There's something uniquely cruel about the thoughts that arrive after midnight. They're not the same thoughts that visit during daylight hours. They're darker, meaner, more convincing. During the day, I can recognize irrational anxiety for what it is. I can talk myself down, use coping strategies, distract myself with work or conversation or movement. But at night, alone in the dark with nothing but my thoughts, those same anxieties become undeniable truths. The rational part of my brain goes offline, and suddenly every fear seems valid, every worst-case scenario seems inevitable, every mistake I've ever made seems unforgivable. I've replayed conversations from twenty years ago. I've worried about things that haven't happened yet and probably never will. I've mentally prepared for catastrophes that exist only in my imagination. I've solved problems that don't need solving and created problems that don't exist. My husband sleeps peacefully beside me while I lie awake, convinced that some minor misstep I made during the day has irreparably damaged my entire life. "Why do you do this?" he asked once, after finding me crying at 3 AM about something I couldn't even articulate. "Why do you torture yourself like this?" I didn't have an answer then. But I do now. The Science of the Spiral Our brains are fundamentally different at night. This isn't just psychological—it's biological. As my therapist explained it, the prefrontal cortex—the part of your brain responsible for rational thinking, perspective, and emotional regulation—starts to power down as you get tired. Meanwhile, the amygdala, your brain's fear center, stays wide awake. It's like the adult supervisor leaving a room full of anxious children. Without the rational brain to provide context and perspective, your anxieties run wild, unchecked by logic or reason. Add to this the fact that nighttime naturally triggers our evolutionary threat-detection systems. For thousands of years, darkness meant vulnerability. Our ancestors who stayed alert at night, scanning for predators and dangers, were more likely to survive. We've inherited those vigilant, worried nighttime brains. But instead of scanning for predators, we scan our memories for social threats, professional failures, relationship problems, and existential fears. The isolation of night amplifies everything. During the day, we're distracted by a thousand stimuli—work, conversations, movement, light, noise. At night, there's just you and your thoughts. No distractions, no escape, nowhere to hide from the anxieties you've been outrunning all day. The Anxiety I've Carried I can trace my nighttime overthinking back to childhood, to nights spent lying awake listening to my parents fight, trying to predict whether the argument would escalate, rehearsing what I'd do if things got worse. I learned to be hypervigilant at night. To problem-solve in the dark. To mentally prepare for catastrophes while everyone else slept peacefully. That hypervigilance never left. Even though I'm safe now, even though there's no real threat, my brain still performs the same nightly ritual: scan for dangers, replay interactions for hidden meanings, prepare for worst-case scenarios. By the time I was thirty, nighttime overthinking had become so routine I barely questioned it. I thought everyone spent hours awake analyzing their day, worrying about tomorrow, catastrophizing about everything that could go wrong. It wasn't until my doctor suggested my chronic insomnia might be anxiety-related that I realized: this wasn't normal. This was my nervous system stuck in a loop, treating everyday life like a constant threat. The Topics That Haunt Us The content of nighttime overthinking follows predictable patterns. We don't lie awake thinking about our successes or the things that went well. We fixate on: Social interactions. Every conversation becomes evidence of our inadequacy. "Why did I say that? What did they think? Did I sound stupid? Do they hate me now?" Past mistakes. Things we did years ago, mistakes we've already apologized for, embarrassments that probably no one else even remembers—they all resurface at 2 AM with fresh urgency. Future catastrophes. Our minds spin elaborate disaster scenarios. What if I lose my job? What if my partner leaves? What if I get sick? What if everything falls apart? Existential dread. Who am I? What's the point? Am I wasting my life? Have I made all the wrong choices? Physical symptoms. A headache becomes a brain tumor. Fatigue becomes a serious illness. Every bodily sensation becomes potential evidence of imminent death. The darkness amplifies everything, stripping away the perspective and proportion that daylight provides. A minor awkwardness becomes social catastrophe. A small worry becomes existential crisis. The Exhausting Performance What makes nighttime overthinking so damaging isn't just the lost sleep—it's the way it bleeds into the next day. I'd wake up exhausted, my mind still heavy with the previous night's anxieties. I'd drag myself through the day, caffeine-fueled and barely present, already dreading the moment I'd have to go to bed again and face another night of mental torture. The overthinking created a vicious cycle. The anxiety kept me awake, which made me more tired, which made my prefrontal cortex even less effective the next night, which led to even worse overthinking. I started avoiding sleep. I'd stay up late scrolling my phone, watching TV, doing anything to delay the moment I'd have to turn off the lights and face my thoughts. Which of course made everything worse. My relationships suffered. I'd be irritable and withdrawn, too exhausted to be present. My work suffered—it's hard to focus during the day when you've spent the night catastrophizing about everything that could go wrong. But the worst part was the shame. I felt weak for not being able to control my own thoughts. I felt ridiculous for losing sleep over things that seemed so trivial in the morning. I felt alone, convinced that everyone else had figured out how to turn off their brains at night while I remained broken. The Breaking Point The crisis came during a particularly bad week when I'd averaged maybe three hours of sleep a night. I was sitting in a meeting at work, and my boss asked me a direct question. My mind went completely blank. I couldn't remember where I was or what we were discussing. I excused myself, went to the bathroom, and had a panic attack in a stall. This couldn't continue. The nighttime overthinking wasn't just stealing my sleep—it was stealing my life. That afternoon, I called a therapist who specialized in anxiety and insomnia. "Tell me about your nights," she said. I described the spiral—the replaying of conversations, the catastrophizing, the inability to shut my brain off, the shame of lying awake while everyone else slept peacefully. "You're not broken," she said. "Your brain is doing exactly what anxious brains do at night. But we can teach it something different." The Work of Quieting the Mind Healing nighttime overthinking wasn't about thinking my way out of it—it was about changing my relationship with my thoughts. My therapist taught me that thoughts at 3 AM aren't truth—they're just thoughts, colored by fatigue, darkness, and an offline prefrontal cortex. I didn't need to believe them or solve them. I just needed to acknowledge them and let them pass. We practiced cognitive defusion—learning to observe my thoughts without getting caught in them. Instead of "I'm going to get fired," I'd think "I'm having the thought that I'm going to get fired." Small shift, massive difference. It created space between me and the anxiety. I learned the "worry window" technique—setting aside 15 minutes during the day to deliberately worry about everything on my mind. When nighttime anxieties appeared, I could tell myself, "Already addressed this during worry time. Moving on." I established a wind-down routine that signaled to my nervous system that it was safe to sleep. No screens for an hour before bed. Gentle stretching. Reading something light. Making my bedroom a sanctuary rather than a courtroom. I practiced grounding techniques when the spiral started. Five things I could see, four I could touch, three I could hear. Counting breaths. Anything to bring me back to the present moment instead of the catastrophic future my mind was creating. The Unexpected Discoveries As I worked on the nighttime overthinking, I started noticing patterns. The spiral was worst on days when I'd ignored my feelings, when I'd pushed through stress without acknowledging it, when I'd said yes when I meant no. The nighttime overthinking wasn't random. It was my psyche's way of processing things I hadn't dealt with during the day. All the feelings I'd stuffed down, all the concerns I'd dismissed, all the stress I'd tried to outrun—it all surfaced at night when my defenses were down. I started addressing things in real-time instead of stockpiling them for the 3 AM review. If a conversation bothered me, I'd process it during the day instead of waiting for my exhausted nighttime brain to catastrophize it. If I was stressed, I'd acknowledge it instead of pretending I was fine. The less I suppressed during the day, the less my brain had to process at night.
By Ameer Moaviaabout a month ago in Psyche
How Childhood Trauma Shapes Adult Fear
I can trace almost every fear I have as an adult back to a specific moment in childhood. My fear of abandonment? It started the night my mother packed a suitcase during a fight with my father and said, "I'm leaving, and I'm never coming back." She came back three hours later, but seven-year-old me didn't know she would. Seven-year-old me spent those hours convinced that mothers could just disappear, that love could evaporate without warning. My hypervigilance in relationships? It began during the years I spent walking on eggshells around my father's unpredictable rage, learning to read the tension in his shoulders, the tone of his voice, the weight of his footsteps. By the time I was ten, I could predict his moods with frightening accuracy. I had to—my safety depended on it. My inability to accept help or show vulnerability? That crystallized the day I fell off my bike and came home bleeding and crying, only to have my father tell me to "stop being a baby" and send me back outside. I learned: pain is something you handle alone. Needing someone makes you weak. I thought I'd left that childhood behind. I thought becoming an adult meant those old wounds would stop mattering. I was wrong. The Architecture of Fear Childhood trauma doesn't stay in childhood. It doesn't remain a bad memory you can file away and move past. It becomes the foundation upon which you build your entire adult life—your relationships, your career choices, your capacity for trust, your sense of safety in the world. A child's brain is exquisitely designed to learn from experience, to adapt to their environment, to develop strategies for survival. When that environment is unpredictable, frightening, or emotionally unsafe, the child's brain learns accordingly. It learns: people are dangerous. Love is conditional. The world is threatening. You are alone. These aren't conscious thoughts. They're pre-verbal conclusions that get encoded into your nervous system, your implicit memory, your automatic responses. They become the operating system that runs in the background of your adult life, influencing decisions you think you're making rationally. My therapist explained it to me this way: "The child you were is still inside you, and that child is still afraid. When you encounter situations as an adult that resemble your childhood trauma—even loosely—that frightened child takes over. You stop responding from your adult self and start reacting from your child self." That's why I, a competent professional, would have panic attacks when authority figures got angry. That's why I'd sabotage relationships the moment they got too close. That's why I couldn't relax, couldn't trust, couldn't let my guard down. I wasn't living my adult life. I was defending against my childhood. The Invisible Inheritance The most insidious thing about childhood trauma is how normal it feels. Growing up, I didn't think my childhood was traumatic. We weren't homeless. I wasn't physically abused. My parents stayed together. We had food, shelter, the basics. Compared to kids who had it worse, I thought I had nothing to complain about. But trauma isn't a competition. You don't need the worst childhood to be affected by it. Emotional neglect is trauma. Unpredictable parental moods are trauma. Witnessing conflict you couldn't control is trauma. Being taught that your feelings don't matter is trauma. I grew up in a home where anger exploded without warning, where love felt conditional on good behavior, where emotional needs were treated as inconvenient. That was my normal. I didn't know any different. So I carried those patterns into adulthood without recognizing them as problems. I thought everyone felt anxious all the time. I thought everyone struggled to trust people. I thought everyone had a voice in their head constantly scanning for danger, preparing for catastrophe. It wasn't until my marriage started falling apart that I realized: the way I experienced the world wasn't universal. It was specific to me, to my history, to the child I'd been who'd learned some very effective but ultimately damaging survival strategies. The Patterns We Repeat My husband was nothing like my father. He was gentle, stable, emotionally available. Everything my child-self had desperately wanted. But I couldn't receive it. Every time he got close, I'd push him away. Every time he tried to comfort me, I'd shut down. Every time he expressed frustration—normal, healthy frustration—I'd interpret it as rage and disappear emotionally for days. I was replaying my childhood, casting him in roles he never auditioned for, reacting to threats that didn't exist in our relationship but had very much existed in my family of origin. "Why do you do this?" he asked after one particularly painful fight. "Why do you run every time things get hard?" I didn't have an answer then. But in therapy, I found one: I ran because running had kept me safe as a child. I withdrew because withdrawal had protected me from my father's anger. I expected abandonment because I'd learned that love was temporary and conditional. I was forty years old, but in my marriage, I was still that seven-year-old girl, using the only tools she'd ever learned.
By Ameer Moaviaabout a month ago in Psyche
The Mind’s Way of Protecting Us Through Numbness
The call came at 2 AM on a Friday. My father had a heart attack. Massive. Unexpected. He was gone before the ambulance arrived. I listened to my sister's sobbing voice, said the right things, made the necessary calls, booked a flight home. I moved through the next week like a well-programmed robot—funeral arrangements, paperwork, comforting relatives, delivering a eulogy that people said was beautiful. Everyone commented on how strong I was. How well I was holding up. How brave. But I wasn't strong. I wasn't brave. I was nothing. I felt absolutely nothing. I stood at my father's grave and waited for tears that never came. I looked at his photo and felt like I was looking at a stranger. I heard people share memories and couldn't connect to my own. It was like watching my life through soundproof glass—I could see everything happening, but I couldn't feel any of it. "Why aren't I sad?" I asked my therapist two weeks later. "What's wrong with me?" She leaned back in her chair, her expression gentle. "Nothing's wrong with you. Your mind is protecting you. You've been through too much, too fast. So it's doing the only thing it can—it's shutting down the pain receptors until you're ready to feel it." The Breaking Point Before the Numbness My father's death wasn't the first blow. It was just the final one. In the eighteen months before he died, I'd lost my job in a brutal round of layoffs, watched my marriage disintegrate through a painful divorce, moved three times, and discovered my teenage daughter was struggling with depression. I'd been operating in crisis mode for so long that crisis had become my baseline. Each loss, each trauma, each disappointment had chipped away at my capacity to feel. I'd processed what I could, stuffed down what I couldn't, and kept moving forward because stopping felt impossible. My father's death should have shattered me. Instead, it was like my emotional system looked at this new tragedy and said, "Absolutely not. We're at capacity. We're shutting this down." And just like that, I went numb. Not sad-numb or depressed-numb. Just... nothing. A vast, empty quiet where feelings used to be. Like someone had turned off all the lights in my interior world and left me standing in the dark. The Mechanism of Mercy Numbness gets a bad reputation. We treat it like emotional failure, like evidence that something's fundamentally broken. But my therapist helped me understand: numbness isn't malfunction. It's protection. "Think of it like a circuit breaker," she explained. "When the emotional system gets overloaded, when there's too much pain coming in too fast, your mind flips a switch to prevent complete collapse. It's not that you can't feel—it's that you've temporarily lost the capacity to feel because feeling everything at once would destroy you." Numbness is your mind's emergency response to unbearable circumstances. It's the psychological equivalent of shock after physical trauma—your system flooding with natural anesthesia so you can survive what you otherwise couldn't endure. In a strange way, going numb was the kindest thing my mind could do for me. It gave me space. Distance. Time to catch my breath before the full weight of my grief crushed me. The World That Doesn't Understand But the world doesn't see numbness as protection. It sees it as pathology. People started asking if I was okay, their voices edged with concern and judgment. "You seem so... detached," they'd say. "Are you sure you're processing this?" My sister accused me of not caring. "You didn't even cry at Dad's funeral," she said, her voice sharp with pain and accusation. "How can you be so cold?" I wanted to explain that I wasn't cold—I was frozen. That there's a difference between choosing not to feel and being incapable of feeling. That I would have given anything to cry, to hurt, to feel connected to my own grief. But I had no words. The numbness had taken those too. Society expects grief to look a certain way—tears, visible pain, emotional expression. When you don't perform grief correctly, people assume you're either in denial or you didn't love the person who died. Nobody considers that you might be loving them so much that your mind had to temporarily shut down your ability to feel it, just so you could survive.
By Ameer Moaviaabout a month ago in Psyche
The Speed of Life
We live in an age where speed is celebrated. Faster internet, faster success, faster replies, faster results. From the moment we wake up, life seems to press a silent accelerator. Notifications buzz, deadlines chase us, and comparison quietly sits in our pockets. The speed of life keeps increasing—but the quality of life often does not. This raises a powerful psychological question: Is moving faster actually helping us live better, or is it slowly draining the meaning from our lives?
By Alexander Mindabout a month ago in Psyche
The Ghosts That Wait: Understanding Why Old Wounds Bleed in New Moments
It was just a Tuesday. Nothing special, nothing traumatic. I was standing in line at my usual coffee shop, scrolling through emails, half-present in the mundane rhythm of my morning routine. And then I heard it—a man's laugh from somewhere behind me. Deep, familiar, with that particular cadence that made my chest tighten. My hands started shaking. My breathing became shallow. Tears burned behind my eyes for no reason I could immediately name. The laugh wasn't his. The man wasn't him. My ex-fiancé lived three thousand miles away and we hadn't spoken in five years. I'd done the therapy. I'd done the healing work. I'd moved on, fallen in love again, built a beautiful life. So why was I standing in a coffee shop at nine in the morning, fighting the urge to run, feeling like I was drowning in pain I thought I'd left behind? The Myth of Linear Healing We're told that healing is a journey with a clear destination. You process the trauma, you do the work, you move forward, and eventually, you arrive at "healed." Past tense. Complete. Done. Nobody tells you that healing isn't a straight line—it's a spiral. You circle back to the same wounds at different altitudes, seeing them from new perspectives, feeling them with different intensities. You can be genuinely okay for months or years, and then something small—a song, a scent, a stranger's laugh—rips the scab off a wound you didn't even know was still there. After the coffee shop incident, I went home and canceled my meetings. I spent the day curled up on my couch, crying about a relationship that ended half a decade ago, feeling stupid and weak and confused. "I thought I was over this," I told my therapist later that week. "Why is this happening now?" She smiled with the gentle patience of someone who'd heard this question a thousand times. "You are over it. But your nervous system has a longer memory than your conscious mind. It's trying to protect you from something it thinks might happen again." The Body's Archive Our bodies are remarkable archivists. They catalog every moment of fear, every instance of heartbreak, every second of helplessness we've ever experienced. Not to punish us, but to protect us. This is what trauma specialists call implicit memory—emotional and sensory information stored below conscious awareness. When you experience something painful, your brain doesn't just file it away with a neat label and a timestamp. It creates an entire sensory network of associations: sounds, smells, times of day, tones of voice, patterns of behavior. Years later, when something in your present environment matches something from that network—even loosely—your body sounds the alarm before your conscious mind even registers the connection. That laugh in the coffee shop? My nervous system recognized it as a threat signature from my past. It didn't matter that my conscious mind knew I was safe. My body remembered betrayal, and it was trying to protect me from experiencing it again. The Triggers We Don't See Coming The cruelest thing about resurfacing pain is its unpredictability. You brace yourself for the obvious triggers—anniversaries, familiar places, certain songs. But then you're blindsided by things you never saw coming. A friend's wedding sent me into a spiral of grief about my father's death, even though he'd been gone for seven years. The smell of cigarette smoke in a parking lot transported me instantly to my childhood, to feelings of fear and uncertainty I thought I'd processed. A colleague's dismissive tone in a meeting triggered shame from bullying I experienced in middle school, decades ago. Each time, I'd feel ambushed. Each time, I'd question whether I'd actually healed at all or if I'd just been fooling myself. But I was learning something crucial: the pain resurfacing doesn't mean the healing didn't happen. It means there are layers. Healing isn't about erasing the past—it's about changing your relationship with it.
By Ameer Moaviaabout a month ago in Psyche
The Weight of Words Never Spoken: What Happens When We Bury Our Emotions Alive
For years, I smiled through the pain, convinced that silence was strength. It wasn't until my body started screaming what my mouth refused to say that I learned the true cost of swallowing my truth. The panic attack hit me in the middle of a Tuesday morning meeting. One moment I was nodding along to quarterly projections, and the next, my chest tightened like someone had wrapped steel cables around my ribcage. My hands trembled. The room spun. I couldn't breathe. Twenty faces stared at me as I mumbled an excuse and stumbled out, convinced I was dying. The ER doctor's words still echo in my mind: "Physically, you're fine. But your body is trying to tell you something." I wanted to laugh. My body had been screaming at me for years. I just hadn't been listening. The Art of Pretending I learned early that emotions were inconvenient. Crying made people uncomfortable. Anger made me difficult. Sadness was selfish when others had it worse. So I became an expert at the smile that didn't reach my eyes, the "I'm fine" that meant anything but. When my father left without saying goodbye, I swallowed my abandonment and wore a brave face for my mother. When my best friend betrayed my trust, I pushed down the hurt and pretended it didn't matter. When my boss belittled me in front of colleagues, I buried my humiliation under layers of professional composure. I told myself I was being strong. Mature. Rising above it all. What I was actually doing was building a pressure cooker inside my chest, adding more heat every time I chose silence over honesty, more tension every time I said "it's okay" when it absolutely wasn't. When the Body Keeps Score The human body is remarkably honest. It will express what the mouth refuses to say. My suppressed emotions didn't disappear—they just found other ways to speak. The chronic headaches that no medication could touch. The insomnia that left me staring at the ceiling at 3 AM, mind racing with thoughts I wouldn't let myself think during daylight. The digestive issues that doctors couldn't explain. The inexplicable fatigue that made even simple tasks feel mountainous. I visited specialist after specialist, searching for a physical explanation for what was actually an emotional rebellion. My body had become a museum of unexpressed feelings, each symptom a exhibit of something I'd refused to process. The panic attacks became more frequent. My immune system weakened. I'd catch every cold, every flu, as if my body was too exhausted from managing my emotional lockdown to defend against anything else. The Breaking Point The Tuesday morning panic attack was my breaking point, but it wasn't the beginning. It was just the moment I could no longer ignore what had been building for decades. That night, alone in my apartment, I finally let myself feel. Not just the fear from the panic attack, but everything I'd been storing in the vault of my chest. The grief. The rage. The disappointment. The loneliness. The hurt.
By Ameer Moaviaabout a month ago in Psyche
The Night I Understood Football
I didn’t go to the game expecting hope. It was a cold November Thursday. My brother had just lost his job. My nephew hadn’t spoken in days after a school incident. The world felt heavy, and the last thing I wanted was to watch a mismatch—our hometown team facing a dynasty that hadn’t lost in months.
By KAMRAN AHMADabout a month ago in Psyche
The Emotional Impact of Growing Up Unloved
Nina was thirty-four when someone asked her what she needed, and she realized she didn't know how to answer. Her friend had noticed she looked exhausted—working sixty-hour weeks, managing everyone's problems, never saying no to anyone. "What do you need right now, Nina? How can I help?" Nina opened her mouth. Closed it. Felt panic rising. "I'm fine. I don't need anything." But that wasn't true. She was drowning. She just had no idea what she needed because no one had ever asked before. And more fundamentally, she'd learned by age seven that her needs didn't matter.
By Ameer Moaviaabout a month ago in Psyche
PAPER THIN. Content Warning. AI-Generated.
Raffaelo learned the rhythm of cruelty before she learned its intention. It arrived dressed as humor, wrapped in familiarity, passed hand to hand at family gatherings like a shared inheritance. Buffalo. A word chosen not for meaning but for sound, because it rhymed, because it landed easily, because no one had to think before saying it. Her parents said it with smiles, squeezing her cheeks, proud of how unbothered they believed she was. They never noticed how her laughter came a second too late, how she began standing at the edges of rooms as if apologizing for occupying them.
By Designed by Romaisaabout a month ago in Psyche
When Love Feels Like Anxiety
Caleb loved Iris so much he couldn't sleep. Not in the romantic, staying-up-talking-all-night way. In the lying-awake-at-3-a.m.-heart-racing-mind-spiraling way. In the checking-his-phone-every-five-minutes-when-she-didn't-text-back way. In the can't-eat-can't-focus-can't-function-unless-he-knew-she-still-loved-him way. People said he was in love. And maybe he was. But it didn't feel like the love depicted in movies or described in songs. It felt like standing at the edge of a cliff, constantly terrified of falling. It felt like his entire nervous system was wired to one person, and if she withdrew even slightly, his whole world collapsed. It felt, more than anything, like anxiety. They'd been dating for eight months, and Caleb had never felt this way about anyone. He thought about Iris constantly. Needed to know where she was, who she was with, whether she was thinking about him. When they were together, he felt euphoric. When they were apart, he felt like he was suffocating. "You're so intense," Iris said one evening after he'd texted her fourteen times because she hadn't responded for two hours. "I was just at dinner with my sister. I'm allowed to not text you for a few hours." "I know. I'm sorry. I just... I worry when I don't hear from you." "Worry about what?" Caleb couldn't articulate it. That he worried she'd realize he wasn't enough. That she'd meet someone better. That she'd wake up one day and wonder why she was with him. That every moment she wasn't actively choosing him felt like she might be about to leave. "I don't know," he said instead. "I just love you a lot." But it didn't feel like love. It felt like drowning while pretending to swim.
By Ameer Moaviaabout a month ago in Psyche
