I don’t have a nonchalant bone in me.

The closest I’ve gotten to writing how I feel

“Don’t overthink it,” they say, like it’s a switch I can flip without consequence. Like my mind hasn’t already wrapped itself around the thought, tightened its grip, and refused to let go.

Fuck that.

I don’t overthink. I tear myself apart with worry. I take a single moment and turn it over and over in my head the way a tongue worries a loose tooth—obsessively, painfully, unable to stop. I chew on it until it dissolves into something unrecognizable, until it sinks into me and settles heavy in my chest. It eats at my soul quietly at first, almost politely, and then all at once I’m shaking from the inside out, like my body is trying to escape itself.

Whatever emotion shows up—anger, jealousy, embarrassment, joy—it doesn’t knock. It barges in. It feels like I swallowed something I couldn’t digest, something too dense, too sharp, and now it just sits there. Limp and heavy against my lungs. Every breath has to work around it. Every step feels like dragging a weight no one else can see.

And the worst part is knowing there’s nowhere to go.

There is no exit, no shortcut, no door marked relief. There is only the feeling and the understanding that I have to let it pass through me. Not around me. Not beneath the surface. Through every nerve, every thought, every inch of my body. I have to feel all of it—the edges, the center, the aftermath. I have to let it wash over me like a wave that refuses to break.

When people ask, “What’s wrong?”
I hesitate.

Because how do you explain something that doesn’t have a shape? How do you translate a sensation that lives in the nervous system instead of the mouth? How do you say that you can feel every nerve awake and screaming, clawing at the inside of your skin like they’re trying to escape? That your body feels too small for what’s happening inside it? That your insides are inflating, stretching, swelling like a balloon pulled too tight, and you don’t know if it’s going to burst or just keep expanding until calm becomes a distant memory?

It isn’t the fear of something catastrophic happening on the outside that tightens my chest. It’s the knowledge that, internally, the damage is already done. I live braced—muscles tense, breath shallow—waiting for a moment that might never arrive but somehow feels unavoidable. I tell myself “Don’t borrow grief from the past or future.”Every second stretches into that limbo before impact, the instant suspended just before the fall, the crash, the snap. I exist in the anticipation of rupture, even when nothing visibly breaks.

“Don’t borrow grief from the past or future.” And still, the world keeps moving.

People laugh. Clocks tick. Conversations drift forward. And I stand there nodding, smiling, pretending my chest isn’t a war zone.

I envy people who skim the surface of life. The ones who shrug things off, who feign nonchalance like it’s effortless. Nothing seems to cling to them for long. Words slide past. Moments dissolve. They move through the world untouched, unbothered, as if caring deeply is some embarrassing habit they learned to suppress.

I don’t have that luxury.

For me, everything sinks. Every word carries weight. Every glance feels loaded. Every silence turns into a scream I can’t stop trying to translate. I don’t just notice things—I absorb them. I take them home with me. I replay them in the dark.

And it isn’t only the heavy emotions that overwhelm me. Joy hits just as hard.

Excitement floods my body until my skin feels electric, until sleep becomes impossible because my mind refuses to dim. Happiness doesn’t whisper—it rushes, it spills, it consumes. I lie awake replaying moments that made my heart race, conversations that sparked something bright in me, imagining what could come next. Joy makes me restless, buzzing, almost breathless. It fills every available space until there’s no room left for stillness.

Even pleasure carries an edge, because when you feel things this intensely, you’re always aware of how fragile they are. How quickly they can slip through your fingers. How nothing this powerful ever stays untouched for long.

“Don’t borrow grief from the past or future.”

When the moment has passed, when the room goes quiet, I turn inward.

I analyze every conversation I’ve had. Every sentence. Every pause. I wonder how it could have gone better, what I should have said differently, whether my tone was wrong, whether I revealed too much or not enough. I rewrite exchanges in my head like alternate endings to a story I can’t stop revisiting.

It’s exhausting, living this way—feeling everything at full volume while the rest of the world pretends not to care. But it’s also the only way I know how to be alive.

So when you tell me to calm down, to stop thinking so much, to let things go, understand this: I’m not choosing chaos. I’m navigating it.

I’m learning how to sit with the weight on my chest without letting it crush me. I’m learning how to breathe around the swelling, how to ride the wave without drowning. I’m learning that feelings don’t need to be fixed to be valid, and that sometimes the bravest thing you can do is feel everything and stay standing.

I may shake from the inside out.
But I am still here.

And that has to count for something.

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