I’m Not Failing, I’m Feeling.

There are days when I can’t get out of bed, and the world calls it failure. But I know better now. I know that my body is processing storms it didn’t ask for. That my nervous system is still learning safety. That my tears are not weakness, they’re release. I am not failing. I am feeling. And feeling, after everything I’ve survived, is a radical act.

Sometimes the anxiety is so loud I can’t hear myself think. It mimics paranoia, makes me question every glance, every silence, every unfinished sentence. I start to believe the world is conspiring against me, even when I know, rationally, it’s not. My body floods with signals: danger, danger, danger. But there’s no threat I can name. Just a fog that settles over everything. I forget how to do basic things. I stand in the kitchen and can’t remember how to make coffee. I open my phone and forget why. I get locked in a space that feels both too small and endless, and I don’t know how to get out.

It’s not just mental, it’s physical. My chest tightens. My vision blurs. My hands shake. I feel like I’m floating outside myself, watching a version of me that can’t move. And then the shame creeps in. The voice that says, “You should be better by now.” But healing doesn’t follow a calendar. It doesn’t obey logic. It moves like weather, unpredictable, cyclical, sometimes violent, sometimes still.

This isn’t failure. It’s a nervous system trying to protect me from ghosts it still thinks are real. It’s the residue of trauma, the echo of years spent bracing for impact. And when I name it, when I say, “This is anxiety, not truth”, I begin to loosen the grip. Not always. Not perfectly. But enough to breathe. Enough to remember that feeling is not a flaw. It’s a signal. It’s a map. And even when the map is distorted, it still points to something sacred: my aliveness.

I don’t owe anyone a tidy narrative. I don’t owe myself constant progress. What I owe is truth. And the truth is: I am alive. I am tender. I am learning to stay present with what hurts, without turning it into proof that I’m broken. This is not collapse. This is emergence. And even when I feel lost, I am still here. Still feeling. Still worthy.