it's not that deep bro

It's been a while.Longer than I planned actually, which is usually how these things go, you tell yourself it's a short break and then months pass and the break has quietly become a habit.I joined TwoCents about twelve months ago, give or take, a couple weeks before my Youth Service started. I had ideas about how much I'd write, how consistent I'd be. Then 2026 happened, and the writing went quiet along with a lot of other things. I've learned absolutely nothing this past yearOkay, that's not true. I've learned that I know nothing about life, very little about who I am, and that I need to relearn most of what I thought I understood about the universe behind my eyes...which is a less impressive way of saying the unmotivated stretch wasn't really about the writing. The writing was just the first thing to go quiet.I'm still impulsive, still reckless, still emotional and sensitive in the way I've always been but maybe a little more patient now, in the sense that I've started questioning the motive behind my own reactions before I act on them. That questioning is probably where the silence actually came from. It's hard to perform consistency when you're busy figuring out which parts of yourself are real and which parts were just habits you never examined. Take my texting anxiety for instanceSay a message goes unanswered for longer than it should. An hour, maybe two. Nothing dramatic. The kind of gap that means nothing nine times out of ten, someone's busy, someone's phone died, someone's just living their life without checking in every twenty minutes.But somewhere in that gap, my chest gets there first. Before I've even finished the thought, my body has already decided this is the version where something's wrong, where I did something, where I'm about to lose whatever this is. I start drafting follow-up messages I never send. I start rehearsing what I'll say if I'm right to be worried, and what I'll say if I'm not, just in case I need either.By the time the reply actually comes and it's usually something completely unremarkable, "sorry, was in a meeting" I've already lived through an entire small disaster that never happened anywhere except in me.What's strange is how certain I was, that I knew what the silence meant.My mind didn't present it as one possibility among many, it presented it as fact already in progress, and I built an entire emotional response on top of that fact before checking if it was even true. That's the part that unsettles me more than the anxiety itself, how convinced I was that the feeling was information.I'm starting to wonder how much of what I call certainty is actually just perspective wearing a more confident outfit. The story I told myself about the silence said more about what I expect from people, what I assume I deserve or don't, than it ever said about the person who was just in a meeting. Which...probably means a lot of my "knowing" this past year has been less about what's true and more about what I'm braced for aaand I'm going on another tangent again, that's another insight for later.For a long time I called this anxiety and left it there. Lately I'm less sure that's the whole story. It feels less like fear and more like an attempt to control what the silence means before the silence gets to decide for itself. If I can predict the worst version fast enough, brace for it, write the script in advance, it almost feels like I've already survived it, like the bracing did something. It didn't. The message was always just going to say sorry, was in a meeting.I think the same thing happened with the writing, if I'm honest. Somehow, not writing became safer than writing badly, or writing something that didn't match whatever version of "good" I'd built up in my head. So I just didn'tI'm learning, slowly, to let the gap just be a gap. To let two unanswered hours mean nothing more than two unanswered hours, and a few quiet months mean nothing more than a few quiet months, instead of evidence I need to gather against myself. There's still so much I haven't even gotten to, Orientation Camp deserves its own telling and serving in Lagos, is a whole epic by itself full of marvelous misadventures...if I can just get off my lazy ass.

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