Some days I can talk to everyone. I can hold conversations, respond with ease, make people laugh, even carry their emotions alongside my own. I show up, I seem fine, I am fine – for a while. Other days, replying to a single message feels like a mountain. Not because I don’t care. Not because I’m distant or disinterested. But because something in me is already using everything I have just to be here. Awake. Upright. Breathing through the weight.

That’s the part people don’t understand about trauma. It doesn’t always look like panic attacks or breakdowns or tears in public. Sometimes it looks like silence. It looks like unanswered texts. Missed calls. Leaving a message open for hours and feeling overwhelmed by the pressure to find the right words. It’s not about avoiding connection – it’s about having nothing left to give without breaking apart in the process.

There are days my body feels like a crowded room. My thoughts race, my chest tightens, and every sound feels too sharp. I can’t explain why. There’s no single trigger to point to. Just an invisible heaviness that settles in without warning. I can carry it, but I can’t carry other people with it – not on those days.

And it’s hard, because I want to be consistent. I want to be someone others can count on. But trauma doesn’t move in straight lines. It doesn’t care about convenience. It whispers when no one is listening and sits quietly between ordinary moments, making them harder than they should be.

So if I disappear for a while, if I pull away, if I go quiet without reason – it isn’t rejection. It’s survival. It’s me trying to return to myself without letting anyone watch me fall apart in the process. And slowly, I’m learning that the people meant to be in my life won’t need an explanation every time I go quiet. They’ll just wait with care, and meet me when I come back.