@merrykennedy647: For a long stretch, the world looked like it was happening behind glass.   Colors flat. People at a slight, unreachable distance. Like watching your own life on a screen someone set to the wrong picture mode and walked away from.   And if you've ever felt it, you know the quiet terror underneath it: 'I think I'm finally losing my mind.'   You're not. Derealization is one of the most protective moves a brain has in its whole toolkit.   When stress or anxiety runs too high for too long, the mind turns down the dial on reality itself. It pulls you back from your own senses so the full intensity of the moment can't reach you and overwhelm the system.   That fog isn't damage. It's a circuit breaker doing its job a little too well.   Which is exactly why fighting it harder tends to thicken it. Panic reads to the brain as more threat, and the brain answers threat with more distance — so the harder you claw at the glass, the more it frosts over.   It lifts the opposite way to how you'd expect: when the nervous system slowly receives the message that it's finally safe to come back. Less alarm, more ground underfoot, small boring repeated signals that the danger has genuinely passed. You don't think your way back through the glass; you bore your way back, one unremarkable safe day stacked on the last.   Not a breakthrough. A slow, unremarkable thaw.   Then one entirely ordinary day, the saturation just returns. Life in 4K, like someone wiped the lens clean while you weren't looking.   You were never going crazy. You were guarded too well — and the glass comes down the very moment the alarm behind it finally goes quiet.

merrykennedy

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Tuesday 30 June 2026 22:24:59 GMT