Bad stretches have a rhythm you learn.
You wake up braced and the day confirms the brace was correct. Something falls apart and you think, yeah, of course, and you handle it because handling it is what you do when handling is all there is. There’s a grim comfort in the familiar shape of things going wrong. You know the choreography. You know where to put your feet.
Good stretches don’t have a choreography. That’s the problem.
I’m talking about the specific kind of fear that shows up when nothing is wrong. When the week actually went fine. When someone was kind to you and you didn’t have to earn it. When you slept and the sleep was real sleep and not the shallow performance of unconsciousness you do to get through. When you catch yourself laughing at something small and the laugh surprises you because you forgot your mouth could make that sound.
And then the other feeling arrives. The one that ruins it.
It starts in the stomach. A tightness. Not anxiety exactly. Something colder. The part of you that has been keeping count steps in and says: this is a lot of good at once. You’ve been here before. You know what comes after a lot of good at once.
So you start bracing. You don’t mean to. You don’t want to. But the body learned a long time ago that good things are setup. That happiness is the bait and the trap is the losing. You start scanning the room for the thing that’s about to go wrong because your nervous system is convinced the room always contains a thing that’s about to go wrong and you’d better find it before it finds you.
I have ruined perfectly good evenings this way. I have stood in a warm kitchen with music playing and food in my hands and felt the joy drain out of me like someone pulled a plug because I was so busy preparing for the loss I couldn’t let myself have the thing while I had it.
Here’s what I think is actually happening. The fear of losing something good is not separate from the good. It’s the tax. You can’t feel the full weight of joy without also feeling how heavy it would be if it left. The two are braided together. Most people try to unknot them. They try to feel the good without the fear. I don’t think that works. I think the fear is part of what tells you the good is real.
But there’s a difference between feeling the fear and obeying it.
Obeying looks like this: you sabotage. You pick a fight. You go distant. You find a flaw in the person or the situation and magnify it until it fills the whole frame, because a flawed thing is a thing you can leave before it leaves you. You turn the happiness into something you control by being the one to end it. If you’re the one who pulls the plug, the plug doesn’t surprise you.
I have done this. More times than I want to count. The pull is strong. The logic is airtight inside the fear. You think you’re being smart. You think you’re protecting yourself. You’re actually just performing the same rejection you’re afraid of and calling it strategy.
The thing I’m trying to learn, the thing I’m in the middle of and have not arrived at, is how to stay in the good without one foot out the door. How to hold something and not already be mourning it. How to be in a warm room and just be in the warm room.
The body wants to brace. I get it. The body has evidence. The body is not wrong to be cautious. But the body is also not the whole story, and the parts of me that want the good thing are allowed to outweigh the parts that are scared of it.
I would rather have something and lose it than never have anything to lose. That’s the sentence I repeat. Some days I believe it. Some days I don’t. I say it anyway.
Stay in the room. The room is warm. Let it be warm.