The Cost of Building a Life That Was Never Meant for My Nervous System

Why fear isn’t my problem—urgency is

I had my first anxiety attack a couple of days ago.

I hadn’t felt one in three years, which is why it scared me as much as it did.

At first, it didn’t announce itself clearly. My chest tightened. My thoughts sped up. I kept telling myself I was fine. Nothing was actually wrong.

But my body didn’t agree.

It felt like something inside me was bracing for impact. I was about to lose something important and didn’t know how to stop it. It was easy to trace once I stopped fighting it.

I’m worried about my future.

About how to keep supporting my dream of writing while still supporting myself. About not losing my house. About whether I’m allowed to want a life that doesn’t cost me my health.

That realization made me angry.

I Thought I Had Worry Handled

What really pissed me off was thinking I had already dealt with worry. I thought that part of my life was behind me. I thought I could finally focus on what I actually wanted for my future without constantly scanning for danger.

Instead, it felt like my goals were suddenly fragile—like they could be taken away at any moment. Like everything I was working toward could be knocked over with one wrong move.

I don’t even like planning goals anymore. Every time I’ve tried to do things the “right” way, something gets derailed. And when that happens, my body doesn’t read it as inconvenience. It reads it as threat.

As Bessel van der Kolk writes:

“The body keeps the score.”

That’s what this felt like.
Not a mindset issue. Not a lack of confidence.
A body remembering what it costs when I ignore it.

That’s what makes this scary.

I’m trying to build something for myself. I’m afraid to do it because things go sideways fast. When they do, I feel the pull to walk away from my dreams entirely. To retreat into familiar patterns that may have made me miserable. At least it felt predictable.

What Fear Took From Me

I’ve been scared most of my life.

Most of my decisions used to come from fear—even the ones that looked responsible on the outside. Fear chose my jobs. Fear chose who I tolerated. Fear decided how much of myself I was allowed to bring into a room.

I ended up in situations that weren’t healthy, working for people who didn’t care about me, giving more and more of myself just to stay safe. I became a performance monkey—valuable only as long as I could produce.

I was burnt out. My health declined under the constant pressure. But the worst loss wasn’t physical.

It was creative.

Why Losing My Voice Hurt the Most

Losing my self-expression hurt more than anything else.

Self-expression is how I understand reality. I get overwhelmed easily—by information, by emotion, by physical sensation. Writing, creating, and expressing myself has always been how I sort through that overwhelm and make sense of what’s happening.

There’s a reason that loss felt so destabilizing. As Audre Lorde wrote:

“I have come to believe over and over again that what is most important to me must be spoken, made verbal and shared.”

When I lost my ability to express myself, I lost my orientation.

I worked jobs where I sold my soul slowly, one day at a time. I worked my fingers to the bone. I gave everything I had, hoping it would finally be enough. It never was. The work was never appreciated, and I learned the hard way that over-giving doesn’t earn safety—it just erases you.

The Blueprint My Body Rejected

For the last two years, I’ve been trying to build something for myself. But I followed a sales-driven blueprint that promised stability and delivered pressure instead.

I wasn’t performing to their standards. I felt reduced to numbers. To money. To output.

I still want to write. I still want to help people. But I’m not willing to do it by disappearing again. I want to do this with me at the helm.

The truth is, I wasn’t listening to myself.

Fear had quietly taken over again.

I wanted to scream at the hustle culture I found myself in. I struggle doubly hard to orient myself in new environments, and at first it was fine. I was learning how to write online, learning a completely different way of expressing myself.

But when it was time to move to the next stage, I got left behind.

My Path Has Never Been Linear

My path has always been a slow grower.

I wasn’t seen as someone with dreams, or as someone doing meaningful work quietly in the background. I have to change my own mind about myself—to build confidence that isn’t borrowed from external approval.

I’m not afraid to walk with fear. I just don’t move in straight lines. I take a meandering path, stopping to check my footing, adjusting when something feels off.

That meandering path is how I stay oriented.

The Cost of Constant Orientation

I’m deaf and neurodivergent, which means I’ve spent my life working hard to orient myself in a world not built for how I process information.

Because sound isn’t an option, I rely heavily on my other senses—visual cues, pattern recognition, intuition. I’m constantly piecing together context, reading situations, making sure I haven’t missed something important.

That effort never turns off.

My nervous system lives close to fight or flight because it has to. Missing information has cost me before—time, money, trust. So urgency hits me harder than it hits others.

I take in information in small pieces, but when I process, I go deep. I turn it over until it fits. That depth gives me insight—but it also makes rushing dangerous.

Why I Can’t Rush Myself Anymore

As always, I underestimated myself.

I used to hate this part of me. Now I see it as a strength. I may be uncertain while I’m walking the path, but once I’ve negotiated it, I understand what I’m doing in a way others don’t.

I’ve come to trust my intuition—not because it’s mystical, but because it’s practical. The problem isn’t that I don’t have it. The problem is that I don’t give myself time to hear it.

That’s the hard part.

Slowing down enough to listen. Letting intuition lead instead of urgency. Fear-based decisions have never worked for me, even when I’ve been able to turn them into wisdom later.

What I need now is time.

Time to listen.
Time to choose from love instead of fear.
Time to stop rushing myself back into a life I already survived.