There are days where you suddenly realize how little you understand yourself despite carrying yourself around for years.

I wrote this after a pretty rough day. One of those days where I had to say difficult things and pretend my body did not immediately register it as some kind of small emotional car crash. I thought I handled it rather calmly too. At least externally. This was, after all, a professional setting. I thought, meh, it is “just” another hard day. The feeling would eventually dissolve as I sat at the coach ride home resorting to my favorite series, like steam escaping from a kettle.

But feelings are strange like that.

Sometimes they linger quietly in your bloodstream a little longer than you anticipated.

That very same day, I also had an appointment with someone whose instincts I trusted deeply. Someone I cared about enough that their presence alone usually softened the edges of my thoughts a little. We had a very clear and practical agenda, to be fair. But somewhere in between conversations I think I dropped small breadcrumbs of how awful I actually felt, and without realizing it, maybe I was hoping they would notice the shape of it.

Or maybe they did and simply stayed within the boundaries of what the meeting was supposed to be.

And strangely, the aftertaste of that stayed with me longer than the difficult conversation itself.

Not because they did something wrong. They really did not. Maybe I confused emotional closeness with emotional availability. Or maybe I simply wanted someone, just for a second, to pause me and let me exist without needing to immediately move forward into the next thing. Honestly, I did not even fully understand what I was hoping for at that moment. Everything about it felt oddly difficult to name.

It is embarrassing sometimes, the things we silently hope people will notice without us ever properly saying them.

—

Anyway, moving into a completely different workspace also feels oddly disorienting in ways I still cannot fully explain yet. Like moving into a house built with slightly different physics. Then again, it is not like I have ever stayed too long in one place either.

I used to be in rooms where people could release that much steam so openly. Frustration arriving fully visible in the room, sharp-edged and alive, then somehow everybody continuing whatever conversation they had afterward as if nothing particularly unusual had happened. The first few times I witnessed it, it fascinated me more than it disturbed me.

Now I am in rooms where everyone seems to be friends with everyone, and somehow that can feel just as unsettling in entirely different ways.

—

Maybe I was too accustomed to restraint. A tad too trained to package emotions neatly before presenting them. And maybe all this unfamiliarity made me realize how quietly environments shape the architecture of our nervous system.

I always thought maybe I had ADHD or maybe I was simply a strange person with an overactive brain. But OCD never once crossed my mind!

To be honest, I did not even really understand what OCD was outside of the watered-down internet version people casually throw around between jokes about cleanliness and color-coded shelves.

I did not know it could look like endless loops rumination. Mentally replaying tiny moments until they lose all original proportions. Feeling haunted by possibilities most people would simply let pass through them like air. I did not know exhaustion could come from your own mind or moral compass trying to negotiate certainty every hour of the day.

And apparently people without this do not scratch themselves this much? Apparently some people really do sleep peacefully for six to eight hours every night without bargaining with their thoughts first. Bizarre thing to find out at 31, right?

And I think the strangest part is realizing how many things I thought were simply “my odd thing” may have actually been survival patterns.