Burnt Toast Season

I’ve been trying to make sense of this feeling for weeks now… the way my body seems to flip a switch sometime around Halloween and doesn’t turn it off until after Christmas, like an internal calendar I never signed up for but can’t escape. It isn’t tied to presents or parties or even grief anniversaries I can name and hold. There’s no single memory knocking, no clear threat announcing itself. It’s not attached to a thought at all. It just is. I wake up already uneasy, before the day has even has a chance to introduce itself, before anything has time to go wrong… my chest tightens, my breath gets shallow, my body acts like it has received bad news my mind hasn’t been informed of yet. My nervous system feels perpetually braced for impact, like I’m standing on the edge of something I can’t see, waiting for the ground to give way. My hands shake without permission. My mind races so fast it sparks those familiar brain zaps, little electrical jolts that feel like my thoughts are short-circuiting under the strain. There’s a low-grade panic humming under my skin… constant, vibrating, relentless… and I don’t know where to put it because there’s nothing obvious to point to, no fire I can see, no reason I can explain, just this overwhelming sense that something is very wrong and I’m already behind in figuring out what it is.

I was pacing the floor when she called for our scheduled appointment, bare feet wearing a path into the carpet, back and forth like a caged animal. That’s what I do when I start to spiral. When my mind is moving too fast to sit inside itself, so my body tries to outrun it. Pacing becomes a way to slow the internal free fall, to bleed off the excess electricity. Maybe if I keep moving, the thoughts can’t catch me all at once. She knows I do this, she’s seen me do it. She knows the sound of my breathing when my thoughts are already ahead of me, already spinning. So, she doesn’t rush me. She lets me pace, lets me spill out every raw, unfiltered half sentence and messy thought and somehow she catches the thread they’re all attatched to... she waits until my breathing slows just enough for her to step in, calm and measured, like she’s waiting for the noise inside me to dip low enough for me to actually hear her from outside of it.

She waits until the moment I start apologizing for not making sense, until I’m circling the same fear for the third time like if I just say it differently it might finally unlock something. My words are tumbling out faster than I can organize them, my body still in motion, my thoughts stacked on top of each other like they’re all trying to be heard at once. That’s when she said something like, “A smoke detector doesn’t know the difference between a house fire and burnt toast… it just knows smoke”. She said it slowly, like she wasn’t trying to fix me, only translate me back to myself. “It’s going to sound the alarm either way”, she said. “Just because your anxiety is screaming right now doesn’t mean it’s telling the truth. The structure isn’t burning down. You’re not losing everything. There’s just some burnt toast”. Something in my chest loosened… not because the panic vanished, not because my body suddenly felt safe, but because the explanation didn’t come with shame attached. I didn’t feel defective or dramatic or weak. I felt… understood. Like maybe my body wasn’t betraying me after all. Maybe it was just doing its job too well, pulling every lever at once, trying to protect me from a danger that once was real. Somewhere along the way, my nervous system learned that this season meant threat, meant loss, meant bracing myself for impact… and now it reaches for the alarm before it pauses to check the facts. Not because I’m broken, but because I survived. Not because everything is burning, but because my body remembers the smoke.

I keep coming back to that image… the blaring noise that fills the entire house, the shrill urgency that hijacks the moment, the way it demands my full attention even when nothing is truly on fire. The alarm doesn’t whisper. It doesn’t wait for confirmation. It screams like everything I love is about to be reduced to ash if I don’t act immediately. And how many times have I let that sound convince me I’m in immediate danger? How many times have I treated burnt toast like a five-alarm emergency, abandoned the room, abandoned myself, heart pounding as if I’m running from something real? How often have I panicked over sensations, the tight chest, the shaking hands, the racing thoughts, without stopping to ask what they were actually trying to protect me from, or when they first learned to be this afraid? Anxiety doesn’t need logic to be loud. It doesn’t require proof. It just needs memory. The body keeps score. It doesn’t check calendars or circumstances or remind itself that I survived before… it only recognizes patterns, familiar smoke, old signals. And maybe this time of year isn’t filled with flames at all, but with residue… more smoke than fire, more echoes than danger, ghosts of past heat still drifting through rooms that are no longer burning.

So maybe the work isn’t silencing the alarm right away or ripping the batteries out in a moment of desperation. Maybe it’s learning how to stand in the noise without immediately assuming the worst, without grabbing my most precious things and running as if everything I am is about to collapse. Maybe it’s teaching myself to pause long enough to notice that the walls are still standing, that the foundation hasn’t cracked beneath my feet, that I’m not actually in danger even if my body insists otherwise. That I don’t have to evacuate my entire sense of self just because my nervous system is shouting like it’s the only one left awake in the house. I can open a window and let the air move through me. I can feel my lungs fill and empty again. I can stay. I can place a hand on my chest and say, quietly and without judgment, “I hear you, but we are okay.”

I know that I don’t need to fix this feeling in order to survive it, don’t need to dissect it or justify it or prove it has earned the right to exist. I don’t need a neat reason for it to be real in my body. I can let it move through me the way a thunderstorm does… uncomfortable, loud, but still only temporary, without allowing it to rewrite the story of who I am or what I’m worth. The toast will burn sometimes. The alarm will scream like it always does, sudden and merciless, demanding my attention even when nothing is being destroyed. And still, this house is standing. The rooms remain intact. The foundation holds. And even with my heart racing and my hands shaking, even with the noise still echoing in my chest, so am I.