You’ve Got Text

Hello, hello. 

Welcome back to Full Fat Blah. 

Where we don’t do small talk, we do small breakdowns. Where the feelings are either 0 or 100. I’m glad you’re here. 

So. Something happened today. Nothing dramatic. No car crashes. No life altering news. Just a single text. Seven words. And that’s it.

But I swear to god… it… shattered me.

To understand why, you’d have to know a bit more about me. And when I say “a bit,” I mean the whole tangled mess of childhood trauma, fear of abandonment, and the Olympic-level mental gymnastics I do inside my brain. That kind of “bit.”

But let’s start with this: I’ve spent most of my life preparing for people to leave. Even the good ones. Even the ones who swore they wouldn’t. I don’t do it on purpose, of course, it’s not some melodramatic act I choose to perform. It’s a reflex. I brace. Constantly. For silence. For withdrawal. For the slow fade-out that never comes with a goodbye, just a growing emptiness. 

So when someone I deeply care about told me two days ago that they’re going through a hard time, my brain immediately translated it to: they’re leaving. 

Which… is unfair, I know. But trauma doesn’t exactly ask for your permission before it starts narrating your reality, does it?

Anyway. I didn’t push. I didn’t poke. I didn’t send a million check-ins disguised as memes. I just sat with it, told myself I’d be fine, and convinced myself I didn’t need a single thing to feel secure. They can leave, it won’t be the first time. I’m armed and ready! (Keep in mind, readers, this was all in my head.)

And anyway, I was not “armed and ready.”

Today, I got a message. Out of the blue. Unprompted. Soft. Simple. Almost normal. There were no paragraphs or explanations. Just a few words that basically said: Reminder, I’m not disappearing from your life.

And I… I looked at my phone for less than a second and immediately broke down.

I cupped my face and sobbed. Like, ugly cried. Because how do you explain what it means when someone preemptively soothes your fear without you even voicing it? How do you explain the relief of not having to over-express, over-perform, or over-explain just to be considered?

That text was the equivalent of someone walking into a room I didn’t know I was locked in and cracking the window open. Just enough to breathe. Just enough to remind me: Hey. I see you. 

Let’s talk about abandonment issues for a second. (AGAIN? Yes, sorry.)

But they’re sneaky. People assume they look like clinginess, or drama, or being “too much.” But more often, they look like distance. Hyper-independence. Over-accommodation. Smiling through panic. Saying “I understand” when you want to scream “please don’t leave.” They convince you that if you love someone right, they won’t leave, but also that no matter what you do, they most definitely will.

Because for someone like me, someone whose nervous system is wired for flight at the first sign of distance, someone who’s spent a lifetime decoding silence and anticipating exits; this kind of security? This kind of emotional consideration? Is revolutionary.

This whole relationship has been the most quietly transformative thing I’ve ever experienced in more ways than I can count. It keeps holding up a mirror to parts of me I didn’t even know were hiding. Gently, without an ounce of judgment. It doesn’t force growth; it invites it. Softly. Safely. (I teared up writing this paragraph.)

It showed me that a person who truly cares about you… will care about your fears; the parts of you that flinch. The parts that brace. They’ll remember those parts. Not to tiptoe around them, but to hold them with care. They won’t treat your triggers like landmines. They’ll treat them like maps. A guide to make sure you always, always, always feel safe.

This relationship didn’t cure my abandonment issues. It didn’t give me the golden sparkly answers. It is in no way perfect. But damn, it had shown me what grace is.

And that? That is the kind of love that rebuilds nervous systems.

So yeah. I broke today. But not in the way I expected. Not in the way I feared. I broke open.

“Sometimes the smallest things take up the most room in your heart.”— A.A. Milne

And yeah… this is me… mentioning FOA again. But hey, in a positive post this time. 

Thanks for reading, lovely readers. For witnessing. For letting me be loud about the quiet things. Remember to be soft too!

Until the next positive breakdown,

FFB