Many people will be able to identify a particular moment, even if they haven’t given it a name. A friend inquires about your true well-being. During a challenging week, a partner reaches for your hand. Someone offers to assist you with a task you’ve been handling on your own. And something tightens rather than the relief that these gestures should logically bring. You sidestep. You claim to be alright. You turn down the assistance. Even though the offer was sincere and the need was genuine, you still felt compelled to keep your distance from the other person. Although it is…
Author: Jack Ward
Some people have a quiet way of processing information. When something challenging occurs, such as a disagreement at work, a setback, or a persistent frustration, they don’t bring it into the room. They hold off. They take a seat with it. They deal with it on the inside, and by the time they’re with other people, they’re at ease once more. This is frequently referred to as emotional maturity, strength, or poise. And it is, in a way. However, there is a cost associated with it that is mostly unreported, in part because those who bear it are the least…
It’s a good job. The partnership is stable. For once, the money is not a source of anxiety, and the apartment is tidy. Life is functioning in every measurable way. However, it has a flatness to it, a muted quality that is difficult to explain to someone who would logically point to the evidence and ask what the issue is. There’s nothing wrong. It’s all good. And that’s practically the grievance. This experience is more prevalent than it is given credit for, in part. It defies the conventional frameworks for emotional distress, and in part because it is hard to…
There is a particular type of fatigue that lacks a clear cause. Not the exhaustion of a challenging week that ends on Saturday morning. Not the fatigue from sickness that goes away as you get better. It’s more akin to a low-pitched hum of fatigue that has persisted for so long that you’ve forgotten about it, similar to how you lose awareness of traffic noise after a year of living close to a motorway. The body adjusts. It is labeled as normal by the mind. And underneath the performance of doing well, the stress continues to build up silently. Clinicians…
The term “young for her age” conjures images of Helen Edwards. At seventy-four, she was managing the family transport company, operating an animal feed business, walking her dog through the hills close to Penrhyn-coch, and swimming in the sea along the Welsh coast. According to her daughter Jane Richards, she was “really lively and fit.” Then she began to feel strange on a Tuesday in early September of last year. exhausted. Achy. A low temperature. The kind of thing that most people recover from with rest and paracetamol within a few days. No one became alarmed. Why would they do…
Some couples begin to have the conversations they have been discreetly avoiding for months at some point, usually between the engagement party and the venue deposit. Cash. Kids. Christmas is given to whose family? What happens if one of you wants to relocate, loses a job, or just doesn’t feel like the person the other one married? These are not romantic discussions. They are essential ones. Additionally, more and more couples are having them without waiting for a crisis. Instead, they are scheduling a therapist. Premarital counseling has lost much of its institutional framing in recent years. Previously, it was…
Some people find a certain type of stillness to be nearly intolerable. It’s the stillness of waiting rather than the stillness of peace. It’s a good relationship. For the first time in years, there isn’t a financial crisis. The health test results were negative. However, there is a low hum of dread somewhere in the chest, just beneath the typical rhythm of a Tuesday afternoon. There’s going to be something. There must be an impending event. It always does. As a philosophy, this is not pessimism. It’s more than that; it’s a nervous system that has been trained over an…
A woman sits on the edge of her new bed in her new city and feels, for some reason, like crying in the middle of what should have been a very good week—the job offer accepted, the apartment finally secured, the long-distance relationship closing its gap. Not because there’s a problem. Because there is something seriously wrong that cannot be explained. She is aware of the situation’s logic. She made the correct decisions. The results are precisely what she had anticipated. However, the sensation in her chest is unrelated to any of that. This is one of the most confusing…