Car Thoughts: 3 Things Anxiety Taught Me

I was driving today. Not doing anything deep. Just running errands, minding my business, existing. And somewhere between the grocery store parking lot and that one red light that refuses to change on time, a thought came to mind:

What if healing isn’t about reinventing myself at all? What if it’s just remembering who I was before I learned to perform for love?

Because, to be quite frank, I don’t even know who that girl was anymore. I don’t remember her softness, or her ease, or the way she moved before life introduced her to disappointment. I don’t remember her laughter without caution. I don’t remember what it felt like to just be, without trying to be good, or agreeable, or “enough” for somebody else. And when I say I’m trying to remember who I was before I learned to perform for love, I mean I literally don’t remember her. Not clearly. Not fully. Because life came for her early.

I see glimpses. Little flashes. A version of myself that existed before the world started handing out instructions on how to be lovable. I was the girl next door. Quiet. Soft-spoken. Shy in a way that wasn’t performance — just pure softness that had no reason to guard itself yet. I didn’t grow up watching healthy love. No one in my family was married. And the relationships I did see were loud, explosive, sharp around the edges. Love always came with tension, silence, or someone swallowing their feelings to avoid being hurt. So I didn’t have a blueprint. I had sitcom fantasies and survival-mode reality.

My mama raised me to be strong. Hyper-independent. Capable to the point of isolation. Because she didn’t trust anyone, she taught me to take care of myself before I ever learned how to receive care from anyone else. And listen… I get why she did it, to an extent. But that kind of independence? It can turn into armor so heavy that nobody can touch you through it. Not even you.

And then boys came into the picture. Not because I was looking for them. But because I was unknowingly looking for love and didn’t know that’s what it was. I had never been shown what soft, safe love looked like — so I was easy to mold. Easy to shape. Easy to impress. Easy to misuse. I didn’t know how to negotiate love because I had never seen it modeled. I only knew how to adapt. How to bend. How to become whatever I thought someone needed me to be. Because in my pre-teen mind, you change for the one you “love”.

And little by little, that girl — the one who didn’t apologize for existing, the one who didn’t overthink her worth—disappeared. Not loudly. Quietly. One compromise at a time. One “don’t be so sensitive” at a time. One “just let it go” at a time. Until the version of me in the mirror was a collage of everyone else’s expectations and none of my own truth.

So when I say I’m healing?
I’m not trying to become a new version of myself.
I’m trying to go back and get her.

So when I talk about remembering myself, I don’t mean nostalgia. I don’t mean going back to some romanticized childhood innocence. I mean uncovering. Unlearning. Peeling back all the versions of me that were built in reaction to disappointment, to survival, to wanting so badly to be chosen.

Because somewhere along the way, I stopped asking:
What do I need?
What do I feel?
What do I want?

I learned to read rooms so well that I forgot how to read myself.

And healing, for me, has become the slow process of sitting with those uncomfortable truths. Not to shame myself. Not to blame who I was for what she didn’t know. But to understand her. To have compassion for her. To bring her back home. And that’s where the clarity hit me today, sitting at that red light like it had all the time in the world.

There are three things anxiety has taught me about myself, love, and the way I show up in my own life.

Three things that I keep coming back to.
Three things that keep revealing themselves again and again.
Three things that have changed the way I move now.

Let’s talk about them.

I didn’t grow up seeing soft love. I saw love that was heavy, loud, inconsistent, or earned. So my nervous system learned early that connection costs something. I learned to read tone, posture, silence, and distance like it was a second language. I became hyper-aware of everything and everyone, because being caught off guard never felt safe.
So I learned to prepare — constantly. Before the conversation starts. Before the text is sent. Before the moment even happens. And the exhausting part is how automatic it is. My body reacts before I have time to think. Like it still believes the past is happening right now.

But… I’m learning, slowly, that I can teach my body safety. Not through force. Not through “calming down.” But through presence. Through reminding myself, “I am here. I am safe. There is no emergency.”

It’s not easy. But it’s possible.

I didn’t learn love as something steady. I learned it as something you proved. I learned that being chosen required effort, sacrifice, showing up even when I was tired, bending even when it hurt. And because of that, I spent years believing that the more of myself I gave, the more lovable I became. I equated care with overextending, attention with self-sacrifice, devotion with exhaustion. I thought being needed meant I was valued, so I poured and poured, even when I had nothing left to give. And anxiety played a huge role in that—she whispered that if I slowed down or stopped showing up, the love would leave. That if I didn’t keep giving, I would lose the connection. So I stayed loyal to exhaustion. I stayed loyal to effort. I stayed loyal to proving I deserved something I should have never had to earn.

But the more I poured, the more invisible I became. The more I gave, the less I felt like myself. And one day, someone who truly loves me told me that if love only exists when I am tired, depleted, or holding everything together on my own, then that love is not love. It’s me abandoning myself in the name of connection.

Now, I’m learning to love in ways that don’t cost me myself. To rest before I break. To let love meet me where I am instead of where I collapse. To understand that real love doesn’t require me to disappear.

Love should feel like presence, not performance.
And I refuse to perform for love anymore.

I spent a long time believing peace was a destination. Something I’d get to once the work was done, once everything was solved, once everyone was okay. I didn’t realize that was anxiety talking. Anxiety trained me to scan for the next problem, the next shift in tone, the next thing that might fall apart. So even when nothing was wrong, my body acted like something was about to be. I couldn’t rest because resting felt dangerous. Stillness felt like vulnerability. Relaxing felt like letting my guard down and inviting disappointment in.

So I kept going. Kept fixing. Kept managing. Kept being “on.”
Not because life required me to carry everything, but because anxiety convinced me that if I didn’t, everything would fall apart. And if everything fell apart, it would be my fault.

When you grow up in environments where love, stability, or safety felt unpredictable, you don’t learn how to relax. You learn how to prepare. Even in the good moments, your guard stays up because a part of you is waiting for the shift. But peace is not something earned. Peace is not a reward for surviving. Peace isn’t something you get after the struggle is over. Peace is something you give yourself while the world is still messy. While the healing is still happening. While things are still uncertain.

Peace is a practice.
A muscle.
Something we remember slowly.

These days, I am learning to unclench my jaw even when I’m not aware I’m holding tension. I’m learning to take a deep breath before I spiral into planning the worst-case scenario. I’m learning to let my shoulders drop. I’m learning to let things be okay without needing proof that they’ll stay that way.

I am learning that nothing bad happens when I rest.
And that is a kind of freedom I didn’t know I was allowed to have.