"Who do you text when everything is falling apart?"

Nobody. I've scrolled through my contacts at 2 a.m. more times than I can count. Hundreds of names. People I laugh with, people I've known for years, people who would probably pick up. And still, my thumb hovers over the screen and then I lock the phone and put it face down on the mattress. It's not that I don't have people. It's that I don't have the words. Or maybe I have the words, but somewhere between my chest and my fingertips they get deleted. I think it started early. My parents weren't bad people. They fed me, clothed me, showed up to things. But emotions were this foreign language nobody spoke in our house. Sadness was met with "you're fine." Crying was met with "stop that." A bad day was met with silence, or worse, a lecture about what I should have done differently. So I learned. I learned that feelings were inconvenient. That expressing them made people uncomfortable, or annoyed, or distant. I learned to swallow them before they could be dismissed. I got really, really good at being fine. The problem with getting good at that is you get good at it everywhere. Now someone tells me they love me and my first instinct is suspicion. Why? What do you want? You don't even know me. I've had friends say it, partners say it, and every time there's this split second where I just... don't believe them. Not because they're lying. Because I genuinely don't understand what they're seeing. It's like being handed a gift I don't know how to hold. I text nobody. Not because I'm brave. Not because I'm strong. Because reaching out feels like standing on a ledge. Because I don't know how to say "I'm not okay" without immediately wanting to take it back. Because every time I've tried, it's come out wrong, or too much, or not enough, and I've watched the other person's face do that thing where they don't know what to do with me. So I sit with it. Alone. And then in the morning I get up and go to work and answer "how are you?" with "good, you?" and nobody knows. I'm writing this because I know I'm not the only one. There are so many of us who were raised to be fluent in silence. Who love people but can't let people love us back. Who have a whole network of support and still feel like there's no one to call.