I didn’t used to think there was anything unusual about the way I live in my body.
I just thought I was serious. Alert. Responsible. The kind of person who notices things.
But if I’m honest, I don’t really relax.
Even when nothing is wrong.
There’s almost always a slight readiness in me. A brace. Not panic. Not anxiety exactly. Just a subtle leaning forward. Like I’m waiting for something to shift.
If the emotional tone in a room changes, I feel it immediately. If someone’s voice tightens, even slightly, I register it. If things get very quiet, I don’t soften. I get more attentive.
I scan.
I didn’t call that hypervigilance. I called it perceptiveness. I called it being tuned in.
It’s only later that I started asking why my body never really stands down.
And the answer isn’t dramatic.
Nothing catastrophic happened.
But emotional safety wasn’t consistent either.
There were moods that shifted without explanation. Distance that would appear without being named. Tension that hung in the air without anyone acknowledging it. Attention that could feel warm one day and absent the next.
When you’re small and that’s the environment, you don’t get the luxury of relaxing.
You learn to read the room.
You learn to anticipate.
You learn that being slightly ahead of the emotional shift gives you some protection.
That’s not pathology.
That’s intelligence.
A child who can track changes has more stability than a child who can’t. A child who stays alert gets hurt less than one who is caught off guard.
So the body adapts.
It stays half-activated.
Not because it’s broken. Because it’s trying to create sufficiency where there isn’t enough.
What I didn’t understand for decades is that the adaptation became structural.
It didn’t turn off when my environment changed.
It just kept running.
Even alone. Even in safe rooms. Even with people who aren’t volatile.
Sometimes especially then.
Calm can feel unfamiliar.
And there’s a strange truth here that’s uncomfortable to admit: when everything gets very still, part of me doesn’t sink. It scans harder.
Like quiet might be the moment something drops.
That’s not personality.
It’s an old rule still operating.
Don’t relax fully.
Stay oriented.
Watch for shifts.
There’s a cost to that.
The body doesn’t fully soften. Sleep doesn’t fully deepen. Rest doesn’t quite restore. There’s always a thin thread of readiness humming underneath everything.
For a long time, I blamed myself for that.
Why can’t I just relax? Why does my mind keep checking the perimeter? Why can’t I feel safe when nothing is happening?
But when I see it as an adaptive pattern — something that formed because safety was insufficient, not because I was defective — the self-attack softens.
Of course my system learned this.
It was trying to stabilize something unstable.
The harder part isn’t understanding it.
The harder part is allowing myself to consider that maybe the conditions are different now.
Maybe the system doesn’t need to hold that level of readiness anymore.
And maybe learning to stand down isn’t about forcing calm.
Maybe it’s about slowly proving to the body that it doesn’t have to work so hard anymore.
I’m still inside that process.
But naming the pattern changed something.
It moved it from “this is just who I am” to “this is something my system learned.”
And that feels like the beginning of root-level work.