For a while, I genuinely believed that staying busy was the same thing as being fine. 

Not consciously. 

I never sat down and decided to outrun my own thoughts. It just happened. There was always a reason to be somewhere, always someone to check in with, always something that needed doing. And life rewards that, in a way. People call you reliable. They call you social. 

Nobody tells you that you might just be avoiding yourself.

But eventually the nights get quiet whether you want them to or not. The friends go home. The phone stops buzzing. And somewhere between the last distraction and the moment before sleep, it's just you. No buffer. No background noise. Just whatever you've been carrying around without fully looking at it.

I remember sitting one early morning, after a night of drinking, smoking a cigarette, filling the silence with music and with nothing in particular happening. No crisis, no reason to feel the weight of anything. And yet there it was. Everything I'd been too busy to feel. Not arriving dramatically, just quietly filling the room the way cold does when a window has been left open. You don't notice it immediately. Then at some point you can't ignore it.

I think I expected that moment to be worse than it was. I'd been avoiding it long enough that I'd built it into something dangerous in my head. But it wasn't dangerous. It was just honest.

And honesty, when you've been starving yourself of it, feels pretty strange before it feels good.

You spend so long being someone for other people... present, available, okay, that you forget being with yourself is a thing that takes practice. That it's actually something you have to learn.

Some people never stop long enough to start.