So Anxious IV: About That Last One

Watch me unravel in real time

So between when I wrote today’s first post (yesterday) and when it went live this morning, I may have heard from some of my favorite people electronically during the hours I described in said post. People who I love with all my heart and soul, and who absolutely represent the asterisk next to any rule I set.

I’m terrified that one or two of them may read this—I released the expectation that my loved ones would read my work a long time ago and I rarely ask because doing so makes me…you know—and that they’ll be offended. When I try to clear distance between myself and people I’m not close to so that I can better love on the ones that are dear (including myself!), I feel like I end up swiping at the wrong target somehow.

I should mention that I’m in therapy and not just dumping my issues on the internet and calling it growth or reflection these days. I hope I’ll get to a point soon where feeling needed, absent a few mutually beneficial scenarios, doesn’t feel like being swallowed, and when human interaction doesn’t require heat, history or blood to be compelling. And I really hope to get to a place where I don’t live in perpetual fear of hurting everyone’s feelings because my anxiety finds me awkwardly vomiting words on the screen and occasionally on the scene. (I be out, I’m just cooler in person than I am from the isolation of the home I barely left for a year, where I had the time and quiet to overanalyze everything.)

Anyway, this addendum is to say that today’s post was not about you, unless it was. But probably not!

-jamilah