Or: how my brain keeps shouting “YOU’RE GOING TO DIE ALONE” during perfectly normal interactions.

There’s a part of my brain that is deeply committed to my survival.
Unfortunately, it is also extremely dramatic, wildly overconfident, and deeply uninterested in nuance.

This is the amygdala. Its job is to notice danger and react fast. It does not care whether the threat is actually happening now. It cares about patterns. Similarities. Vibes. A tone shift that vaguely reminds it of something that happened years ago and which it has never emotionally recovered from.

It is not subtle.
It is also not open to feedback.

Everything Is Fine, Except Apparently It Isn’t

In relationships, this manifests as volume.

A delayed reply becomes abandonment.
A change in tone becomes rejection.
A quiet evening becomes proof that something is wrong and I should emotionally prepare for exile.

Logically, I know this is nonsense.
Physically, my body does not give a shit what I know.

Because the amygdala doesn’t speak in sentences. It speaks in sensations. Tight chest. Clenched jaw. A sudden urge to either explain everything or disappear completely. Fight, flight, freeze, sometimes all three before lunch.

(Yes, a lunch I’ve probably forgotten to eat.)

This is the part of me that fears loss before it happens. The part that learned, early on, that connection could vanish without warning. It doesn’t wait for evidence. It doesn’t ask follow-up questions. It just hits the alarm and leaves me to deal with the emotional admin.

The truly irritating thing is that fear feels exactly like intuition when it shows up in the body.

For years, I mistook anxiety for insight. I thought I was being perceptive. Careful. Emotionally intelligent. In reality, I was just catastrophising with confidence and calling it foresight.

In Which I Am Actually Being Reasonable

What really adds insult to injury is that my behaviour is usually… fine.

I’m communicating.
I’m asking for clarity.
I’m noticing patterns without accusing anyone of crimes.

If someone else described doing exactly what I’m doing, I’d nod along and say, yes, that sounds healthy and proportionate.

My amygdala, however, loses her entire mind.

To her, this is not calm communication. This is escalation. This is exposure. This is the exact moment before everything goes catastrophically wrong. The same actions, viewed internally, are suddenly accompanied by sirens, flashing lights, and a voice shouting “DANGER, WILL ROBINSON.”

Abort mission.
Retreat immediately.
Or overshare wildly.
Possibly both.

She is not fair. She does not scale her response to the situation. She takes perfectly sensible actions and adds a dramatic soundtrack and spends the whole budget on fireworks, just in case.

The Double Standard, Featuring Spoons

Then there’s the double standard, which I find particularly offensive.

When I cancel plans because I’m out of spoons, it’s reasonable. When I realise that past me had wildly different ideas about what was achievable in a single day, that’s also reasonable. Annoying, yes, but reasonable. And in truth I should get a gold star for not pushing through and people pleasing. (But that’s a post for another day.)

I cancel plans. I apologise. I reschedule if I can. And crucially, I know that none of this means I don’t care. I still love these people. I still want to spend time with them. The desire didn’t evaporate just because my capacity did.

That part feels obvious to me.

When someone else does the exact same thing?

Obviously they’re pulling away.
Obviously they’ve bored.
Obviously they’ve realised something and are quietly planning their exit.

Never mind that I understand this perfectly well when it’s me. Never mind that I know, from the inside, how much love can exist alongside a last-minute cancellation. Context collapses. Compassion evaporates.

The rule book changes depending on who’s holding it.

Logically, I know this is absurd.

That this is not a threat.

Emotionally, my body is already packing a bag and rehearsing a sad little monologue about being abandoned and the smallest violin is playing just for me.

Again: not fair. Not evidence-based. Not even especially imaginative. Just a threat-detection system applying wildly inconsistent standards and insisting “this is vigilance, actually.”

Past Me Is a Terrible Project Manager

I think part of this is finally accepting that past me is not a reliable project manager. She is optimistic. She is ambitious. She looks at a day and says, yes, we can absolutely fit all of that in, and then disappears, leaving present me to deal with the consequences.

When I cancel plans, I’m often not choosing between people and rest. I’m correcting an earlier miscalculation. I’m adjusting reality to something my body, my brain can actually sustain. And that doesn’t undo the wanting. It doesn’t touch the affection. It just acknowledges that enthusiasm is not the same thing as energy.

I understand this when I’m the one making the call. I’m learning, slowly, to offer other people the same generosity. To trust that their present selves are also cleaning up after an overcommitted past version.

This, too, is not a threat.

Other People Exist, Inconveniently

I’m also learning, and this one really tests my patience, that other people have whole areas of their lives that exist without me in it. Friendships I’m not part of. Conversations I’ll never hear. Days that do not orbit my presence or absence.

And that this is, still, not a threat.

It’s not a withdrawal.
It’s not a quiet rehearsal of leaving.
It’s just… reality.

Other people having full, textured lives doesn’t diminish my place in theirs. It doesn’t mean I’m replaceable or forgettable or already on my way out. It just means I am not the sole load-bearing structure holding everything up.

Which, when I actually sit with it, is more relieving than frightening.

How wonderful it is that I have relationships with people who have rich, full lives of their own? How treasured it is to be chosen as part of that? Not by default, not by obligation, but intentionally. How rich it is to know that the people I love show up fully present when they’re with me, not tired, not overwhelmed, not running on fumes?

They come rested. They come willingly. They come because they want to be there.

Just like I do with them.

Other people having full, textured lives doesn’t diminish my place in theirs. It doesn’t make me replaceable or forgettable or already on my way out. It just means I’m not the sole load-bearing structure holding everything up.

And that, it turns out, is not a threat…
It’s abundance.

Updating the Operating System

And I think this is the real friction point: the crisis-management style of my amygdala doesn’t fit the life current me actually has.

That approach made sense once. Hypervigilance, over-preparing, scanning constantly for exits. Those were reasonable strategies in a life that felt unstable. But my life now is quieter. Safer. More ordinary, in the best possible way. The emergencies are smaller. The stakes are lower. The threats are mostly imagined.

My amygdala, however, has not updated the brief.

She treats minor emotional discomfort like a five-alarm fire. She responds to scheduling conflicts with the same intensity she once reserved for real danger. She cannot tell the difference between this is uncomfortable and this is unsafe, and she would very much like me to act quickly, while because she can’t see beyond the hill of this crisis.

I don’t need to dismantle the alarm system.
I don’t even need to silence her.

I just need to stop letting her run the day-to-day operations of a life that no longer requires constant emergency response.

Current me gets to choose tools that fit. Tools that assume continuity instead of collapse. Tools that trust that care doesn’t vanish overnight, that people don’t disappear because of one cancelled plan, that love can exist alongside rest.

So when the alarm goes off now, I’m learning to pause. I’m starting to check the facts. I remind myself that past me had a very different job, and did the best she could with what she had.

Then I thank her.
And I turn the volume down.

She hates this.