Faulty Wiring

Somewhere along the way, I became the kind of person who measures her own worth by how well she can survive pain without collapsing under it. Like resilience became the only proof I deserved to take up space. I learned how to carry devastation quietly, how to keep functioning with smoke pouring out of me internally, how to answer “I’m fine” while my nervous system was chewing through itself like exposed electrical wiring sparking behind drywall. I don’t even know when survival stopped being something I was proud of and started becoming the only identity I trusted myself to have. Maybe it happened after enough losses stacked on top of each other. Maybe grief rewired me so thoroughly that this morning I found myself texting my therapist, “I think a couple of the wires in my heart are broke,” like that was somehow a normal way to begin a conversation.No hello. No easing into it. No normal human transition into conversation. Just me, once again, dropping another emotionally charged metaphor into her lap before she’s probably even had coffee, like we’re skipping past pleasantries and heading straight for the emergency broadcast system. That’s our dynamic. Me texting her things that sound vaguely poetic but are actually tiny distress signals wrapped in dark humor. Me treating emotional breakdowns like weather reports. “Storm warning today. Visibility low. Internal damage possible.” And the most telling part is I sent it so casually, too. Like that sentence didn’t carry the full weight of how exhausted I am from feeling everything this intensely all the time. Like underneath the joke, there isn’t this very real fear that something inside me actually is malfunctioning, misfiring. Maybe I’ve spent so many years surviving impossible things that my heart doesn’t know how to exist outside of crisis anymore.

She called almost immediately; she does that when something I’ve said concerns her. I could picture it before I even answered... Her pausing whatever she was doing, rereading my text with that little crease between her eyebrows, already deciding this was not a “respond later” kind of message. And when I picked up, there it was. “Necole,” she said in that tone. That calm, careful therapist tone that sounds like someone trying to talk a person down from the edge of a building without making sudden movements. Soft enough not to startle me. Steady enough to hold the weight of whatever emotional catastrophe I’ve convinced myself is unfolding. “Your wires aren’t broken.” And God, I hate that tone. Not because it’s cruel. Quite the opposite, actually. I hate it because it sounds like compassion wrapped in certainty, and when I’m drowning in my own head, certainty feels almost insulting. Because I don’t want to be gently redirected when I’ve already committed to the narrative that something inside me is fundamentally damaged. I want to sulk in it. I want to sit in the dark with my knees pulled to my chest and insist the whole system is failing while someone hands me evidence that it isn’t. But she always talks to me like I’m something fragile and salvageable at the same time, like a house after a fire. Not untouched. Not unharmed. But still standing beneath the smoke damage. And I think that’s what unsettles me most. The way she speaks to me, as if she can still see the structure underneath all the ruin, even when all I can smell is burning.

It’s not that she’s wrong. Honestly, that’s probably the worst part. She usually isn’t. I think some deeply stubborn part of me wishes she were easier to dismiss, easier to roll my eyes at, and write off as somebody who just doesn’t get it. But she does get it, which somehow feels more invasive. The second I hear that voice, something in me shuts down like a child crossing her arms during an argument she refuses to lose, even when she secretly knows she’s cornered by the truth. I can feel it happen in real time. My jaw tightens. My eyes glaze over. I start staring at random things while she talks, the candle on my dresser, the laundry basket in the corner, the crack in the ceiling paint, anything except the possibility that she might be right about me not being ruined. Because I already know what comes next. The reframing. The gentle unpacking. The careful way she takes my catastrophes apart, piece by piece, until they stop looking like proof that I’m broken and start looking like symptoms of someone who has survived too much for too long. The reminders that trauma changes the nervous system, not the worth of the person carrying it. The whole “you are reacting to pain, not becoming pain” speech sounds beautiful in theory, but feels impossible to believe when your body has been stuck in survival mode so long that peace itself feels suspicious. And maybe on another day, I could absorb it. Maybe on another day, I could let her words settle somewhere soft inside me instead of ricocheting violently off every wall like they’re looking for an exit. But today? No, today I wanted to sulk in it a little. I wanted to sit on the floor of my own sadness, surround myself with all these sharp little emotional fragments, and turn them over in my hands like evidence, insisting they were unfixable. Because sometimes it genuinely feels like something inside me is sparking wrong. Like my heart keeps trying to send signals through burned wiring. Like grief melted something important down years ago, and now everything overloads too easily. Love. Fear. Silence. Distance. It all hits the system too hard. And I know how dramatic that sounds, but there are days my emotions feel less like feelings and more like electrical fires I’m desperately trying to contain before they spread through the entire house.

I’m almost certain there are exposed wires buried underneath my ribs, hissing and short-circuiting every time somebody gets too close. Every time I start to feel safe. Every time I let myself relax into calm for even a second instead of bracing for impact. Because that’s the cruel thing about surviving loss after loss after loss; eventually, your body stops recognizing safety as safety. It treats tenderness like a setup. It waits for the floor to disappear. So the moment someone matters to me deeply, the alarms start going off internally like my nervous system is some run-down building with faulty smoke detectors screaming over burnt toast and ghosts. I can practically feel it physically sometimes, this low electrical buzzing under my skin that never fully quiets. Anxiety crackles through my chest like faulty wiring hidden behind walls, sparking hot enough to start fires no one else can see. Grief pressing its thumb into every old wound just to make sure they still hurt, like it’s terrified healing will somehow erase the people I lost. And it’s exhausting carrying a heart that reacts to everything like it’s an emergency. A slammed door feels catastrophic. Silence feels violent. A delayed response can unravel my entire nervous system before logic even gets a chance to speak. Distance feels like abandonment even when the rational part of me is standing right there, exhausted and out of breath, trying to explain that people are allowed to be busy, overwhelmed, distracted, human. But trauma is louder than reason some days. Trauma doesn’t care about context. It just recognizes familiar feelings and pulls the fire alarm before I can stop it. And the worst part is how embarrassing it feels afterward, realizing your body reacted to something small like the world was ending while everyone else stayed calm. Meanwhile, I’m sitting there trying to subtly regulate my breathing and act normal, while internally it feels like somebody cut the wrong wire and now the whole system is throwing sparks.

And the worst part is how aware I am while it’s happening. That’s the piece that makes me feel the most insane sometimes. I know I’m spiraling while I’m spiraling. I can literally watch the process unfold in real time, like sitting in the passenger seat while my own mind drives straight toward a brick wall with the doors locked. Rationally, logically, intellectually, I know all of these things with complete clarity. But knowledge feels useless once my nervous system decides we’re in danger. It’s like logic becomes this tiny person pounding desperately on the locked door while panic floods the entire house, room by room. Because my body learned grief too well. Learned loss too intimately. Learned how quickly a normal day can become the ‘before’. One phone call and suddenly your entire life is split into categories of who you were before devastation and who you became after it. So now my nervous system treats uncertainty like a loaded weapon. It keeps pulling the fire alarm over burnt toast. Over shadows. Over things that haven’t even happened yet.
Somebody feels distant for a day or replies shortly, and my brain is already building funeral processions for the relationship. I hate admitting that. Hate how dramatic it sounds when written out plainly. But trauma has a way of making your body react to emotional ambiguity like it’s physical danger. My heart starts racing before my mind has even formed a coherent thought. My stomach drops. My hands go cold. Every abandonment I’ve ever survived comes rushing to the surface at once, crowding the room like ghosts all demanding to be acknowledged. And the cruelest part is that even while it’s happening, there’s another version of me sitting quietly in the corner whispering, “Necole, this isn’t rational. You know this isn’t rational.” But fear doesn’t care about rationality. Fear cares about survival. And sometimes I think my body has become so good at surviving pain that now it tries to protect me from love, too.

That’s the part people don’t understand about surviving things that hollowed you out. Your body remembers, even when your mind is desperately trying to move forward as if nothing happened. People talk about healing like it’s this clean, linear thing, like once you’ve “processed” something, it politely packs its bags and leaves your system forever. But grief doesn’t leave that way. Trauma doesn’t either. It buries itself deep in your muscles, your reflexes, your breathing patterns. Your body keeps score in ugly little ways. In hyper-vigilance. In panic. In the way your stomach drops when your phone rings unexpectedly, because somewhere deep inside you still associate ringing phones with life-altering news. In the way your chest tightens the second someone you love gets quiet, because silence has hurt you before. In the way you instinctively prepare yourself for abandonment the moment somebody becomes important enough to lose. People think memories live only in the mind, but mine live everywhere. In my heartbeat. In my jaw tension. In the way I struggle to relax even during beautiful moments because part of me is already grieving them while they’re still happening. That’s what loss does when it cuts deep enough. It teaches you that joy is fragile. Temporary. Borrowed. And eventually, even happiness starts feeling dangerous because you know exactly how devastating it is to lose something beautiful once you’ve finally let yourself need it. There’s a specific kind of terror in loving people after grief. Because now you understand, in horrifying detail, how easily a person can become a memory. How quickly laughter can turn into an ache so sharp it changes the architecture of your entire life. So no, maybe my wires aren’t broken. Maybe they’re just frayed from carrying too much current for too long. Maybe I’ve spent years absorbing shocks that would’ve knocked other people flat to the ground, and now my system flickers every time it senses even the possibility of another hit. Maybe I’m not defective. Maybe I’m just exhausted from trying to keep the lights on through every storm that was supposed to take me out.

Maybe grief overloaded the system. Maybe abandonment scorched a few circuits beyond recognition. Maybe loving people deeply in a world where nothing stays softened parts of me that were never meant to stay this exposed. Because I don’t think human beings are built to lose this many versions of a life they thought they were going to have and still walk around functioning normally afterward. At some point, the nervous system starts improvising. Starts building survival mechanisms out of fear, scar tissue, and sleepless nights. And maybe that’s all this really is. Not brokenness. Just damage from overuse. Wear and tear from carrying too much heartbreak through too many years without ever fully setting it down. But some days the distinction feels meaningless when you’re sitting alone in the dark trying to convince yourself your own heart isn’t failing you. Some nights it genuinely feels like I can hear it struggling. Like there’s this flickering inside me, this dimming and surging, this exhaustion in my chest that no amount of sleep fixes. And maybe that’s why I tune her out when she uses that voice. Because healing is frustratingly uncinematic. There’s no dramatic breakthrough moment where suddenly everything clicks into place and the swelling music starts playing while I transcend my trauma under soft lighting like the final scene of some inspirational film. Most of healing is painfully ordinary. It’s repetitive. Annoyingly slow. It’s somebody patiently reminding me, over and over and over again, that I am not beyond repair while I stubbornly insist I probably am. It’s her telling me to breathe while I’m convinced my lungs have forgotten how. It’s me rolling my eyes at advice I secretly know I need because hope feels riskier than despair some days. Because despair, at least, asks nothing from me. Despair lets me collapse. Hope requires participation. Hope asks me to believe there’s still a version of me underneath all this damage worth saving. And honestly? That feels far more terrifying than sitting in the wreckage pretending the fire already won. But still.

I think a part of me texted her because some quieter, softer part of me wanted to be argued with. Wanted someone to push back against the narrative I keep trying to build out of grief and exhaustion and all the evidence I’ve collected over the years that says love leaves eventually. Out of all the dozens of texts from people who claim to love me but only talk about the parts they despise about me. Because if I truly believed the wires were broken beyond saving, I wouldn’t keep reaching for people capable of reminding me they aren’t. I wouldn’t keep handing my pain to someone and waiting to see if they drop it. I wouldn’t keep testing the edges of connection like someone pressing trembling fingers against a pulse just to make sure it’s still there. And maybe that’s the real truth hiding underneath all of this. Not that I think I’m beyond repair, but that I’m terrified I’ll spend my whole life feeling this electrically fragile. Like one wrong word, one goodbye, one silence too long could send the whole system into blackout again. But even in the middle of that fear, even while insisting I’m too damaged, too tired, too scorched by loss to ever feel normal again, some stubborn little flicker inside me keeps showing up to those appointments anyway. Keeps reaching for her through texts. Keeps asking to be talked down from the ledge. And I think maybe that flicker matters more than all the darkness surrounding it. Because broken things don’t usually beg to be convinced they can still be saved.