The weight of care

the worst days are always the ones where the noise of my own mind becomes too loud to ignore. when you are overly aware of your surroundings, your past, and the internal systems you've built to survive them, reflection stops being a tool and starts feeling like a cage.

lately, i've been trying to parse through a specific kind of mental friction. i used to spend a lot of time immersing myself in psychology and philosophy as a hobby, and while that gave me the vocabulary to analyse my thoughts with an exactness i didn't have before, it also turned me into a hyper-critical observer of my own behaviour. i can evaluate how irrational or negative my tendencies are with a certain ease. but knowing the mechanics of a spiral doesn't stop you from falling into it; it just means you watch yourself fall in high definition.

i value autonomy above almost everything else. i despise possessive, restrictive, or controlling behaviour, which means my brain inherently punishes me for even wanting transient, exclusive attention. it creates a volatile internal dilemma: divided attention feels like a lack of safety, yet forced attention feels unearned. if attention feels demanded, it violates my fundamental desire to prioritize the freedom and independence of the people i care about. but if i don't get that connection, the silence makes me feel entirely detached from everything.

it turns into a cycle of intense guilt. i suspect the discomfort stems from an internalized judgment that my vulnerability, that is, my human desire to be chosen and held in focus, would feel intrusive or stifling, which inevitably triggers a wave of remorse. when you carry deep-seated trust issues and a history of severe neglect, your default setting is to assume that your needs are a burden. you convince yourself that having feelings is a failure of discipline, that it's entirely on you for being like this.

but behaviour isn't immutable, and perspective shifts. when someone genuinely demonstrates that your presence isn't toxic to them, that wanting to share space and time is simply a natural extension of care rather than an act of toxic obssession and possession, the architecture of that guilt begins to crack. now that i've seen otherwise, i'm cautiously confident that these instances of anxiety will diminish, and they'll no longer precipitate such a profound sense of remorse. i'm still trying to figure myself out.

this is the exhausting work of personal evolution. human beings are constantly distracted from the deeper ruminations of life by the sheer momentum of survival. this brings me back to the exact paradox i wrote about previously: the tension between survival and self-assessment. modern existence keeps us too busy for this level of deep psychological triage, forcing a choice between two conflicting paths. do we dedicate our limited energy to agonising internal repair, risking total disconnection from the world around us, or do we allow life to unfold naturally, acting as half-assed productivity machines while remaining blissfully unaware of our deeper complexities?

none of this internal restructuring would be possible without elera ❤︎. thank you for being the most precious, genuinely sweet person in existence, and for completely shattering the rigid biases i held against my own needs. you consistently give me the safety i need to understand myself, heal, and improve, proving to me that growth doesn't have to be a lonely, punitive process. thank you for getting me through this, i genuinely love you so so so so much. thank you. like, i can't even put into words how thankful i am for your existence. you are perfect. in fact, so much more than perfect,,,