Written after the walls didn’t work anymore. Looping Married in Mount Airy.
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I am in the healthiest relationship I’ve ever been in, and I still flinch. There are small, tender moments where his care feels like too much light. Because I’m not used to navigating human connection without constantly monitoring my emotional “health bar.” I’ve always measured safety in terms of what I could withstand, not what I could trust.
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He asks how I’m feeling, he remembers the way I like my coffee, he notices when my voice dips a little too low. Yet, some part of me still wants to hide. This is the first time I’ve felt love. Real love. Not performance, conditioning, confusion, control, or chaos. Never had I linked these with passion. My relationships had always felt numb. I’m still fighting the instinct to keep a part of myself behind the curtain. I think my nervous system hasn’t caught up with my current life. It’s still calibrated to survive, trained by a lifetime of feeling the need to be too careful, too guarded.
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So now, even being seen by someone who genuinely cares can feel like exposure, as if the moment he fully sees me, he might stop loving me altogether. I’ve been with people who didn’t notice me at all. I’ve also been with people who noticed everything, only to control it. Some were wildly jealous, some couldn’t care less if I disappeared, some were just… there, and I filled in the gaps for them. I convinced myself I had feelings when all I had was a script to follow in every single one of them. None of those felt like this. Because I don’t feel tolerated, handled or ignored anymore. That’s a harder adjustment than I initially expected.
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He opens up to me and it cracks something in me wide open. I feel my ribcage opening up. When he first confessed his feelings, it knocked the wind out of me. People have confessed to me before, his was the first one I didn’t know how to carry. Because real feelings come with real risk and I had spent so long keeping things blurry, safe, distant.
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Healthy love demands presence. Transparency. Celebration of emotions I’d either weaponize or repress in the past. While it is deeply rewarding, it is also terrifying. There is no mask to wear here, no game to win, no chaos to manage. Just us, as we are.
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My body still sometimes reads it as unfamiliar terrain. Healing is disorienting when you’ve built your personality on surviving.
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You might enjoy my Rooms collection.
