Yesterday something unpleasant\u00a0happened. I will not go into\u00a0details, they are not necessary, and\u00a0the people involved deserve respect and\u00a0anonymity. But what came out of it is\u00a0worth telling, because it showed me\u00a0three things at once, and each one left\u00a0a different mark.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In the afternoon, after a moment of intense tension that left me shaken, I experienced something I had never felt with this intensity before. One part of me was watching the other. I knew, with total clarity, that the fear I was feeling was irrational. I knew that what I was afraid of had no real basis. And yet I could not act on that knowledge. The techniques that usually help me were not working. I felt stuck, with a physical ache in my legs that I knew was psychosomatic, and my mind racing toward absurd work scenarios.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
There is a precise neurological explanation for this. The prefrontal cortex, the part that regulates rational thought and decision-making, was still partially active, but the amygdala, the brain’s alarm centre, had taken over. A tug of war where you know who should win but for a while you lose anyway.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I came out of it thanks to my wife, who guided me through grounding and breathing techniques, telling me to focus on the here and now. In that moment, while she was applying what she had learned in her own therapeutic path, my mind made an association entirely its own: I thought of Wittgenstein, of dissolving a badly posed problem instead of solving it. I do not know if that is philosophically orthodox, probably not. But my reticular thinking was working anyway, even while the rest of me was stuck. And thinking about it now, that comforts me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The tug of war between the amygdala and the cortex is not won forever. It can be trained. Over time, recovery gets faster. Yesterday it took hours. Maybe one day it will take minutes. Not zero, but less.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In the conversation that followed with my wife, she pointed out something I am carrying with me now. There is a huge difference between someone who tells you “call me if you feel bad” and someone who is actually there, without needing to be called.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
She and I, given who we are, cannot adapt ourselves to just anyone. We look for few people, but the right ones, people who share a certain way of thinking, even with different shades between the two of us. And with those few people the relationship does not need to be invoked. It is simply there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Before my own process of change I used to try to adapt to everyone, to try to get along with anyone. I have understood that it makes no sense, and it is an enormous cognitive burden that leads nowhere real.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The third thing is the hardest to write, and I write it with care.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Sometimes you can grieve someone who is still alive. They are not dead, they walk, talk, exist. But the person you knew, the one you shared something genuine with, at a certain point stops existing, replaced by someone else who carries the same name but not the same face.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Yesterday I understood clearly that this has happened to me. It was not sudden, it was a slow process, made of ignored signals, of hopes that things would go back to how they were, of attempts to fix what perhaps cannot be fixed. Someone who knows me well, and who is also a therapist, had been telling me this for a while, with gentle but clear words: the person you remember no longer exists, accept it, and step away so you can be well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is not a moral condemnation. It is a statement of fact. People change, sometimes for the better, sometimes in a direction that pushes away those who loved them. And when someone never questions themselves, when they judge everyone and everything without ever turning that gaze inward, dialogue becomes impossible, not out of cruelty, but out of a lack of common ground.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Making peace with this does not mean you stop caring. It means you stop expecting something that will not come back in the form you remember.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Today, the day after, I am well. Not perfectly, but well. The night always brings a partial reset, the mind reprocesses in sleep and by morning things look different, even when the pain remains.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I know that on Monday I will go back into a context that requires balance, almost survival in certain moments, before recalibrating on the real work ahead. I know that sooner or later we will step away from that context, together, when the time is right. And I know that this weekend, between a twelve-hour volleyball tournament with the volunteer ambulance service and a board game night with real friends, I am already doing what I need to recharge. Not as an escape, as care.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This episode, painful as it was, has also strengthened something between me and my wife. Not in the trivial sense of “she is right, I always back her up.” Something purer. Two people who truly see each other, even in their respective fragilities, and who choose to stay close precisely because of that, not despite it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Yesterday something unpleasant happened that showed me three things at once. How the mind can know a fear is irrational without being able to act on that knowledge. How “call me if you feel bad” is not enough, and real presence is needed instead. And how you can grieve someone who is still alive, when the person you knew stops existing while still being in the world. <\/p>\n
Today, the day after, I am well. Not perfectly, but well.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"site-sidebar-layout":"default","site-content-layout":"","ast-site-content-layout":"default","site-content-style":"default","site-sidebar-style":"default","ast-global-header-display":"","ast-banner-title-visibility":"","ast-main-header-display":"","ast-hfb-above-header-display":"","ast-hfb-below-header-display":"","ast-hfb-mobile-header-display":"","site-post-title":"","ast-breadcrumbs-content":"","ast-featured-img":"","footer-sml-layout":"","theme-transparent-header-meta":"","adv-header-id-meta":"","stick-header-meta":"","header-above-stick-meta":"","header-main-stick-meta":"","header-below-stick-meta":"","astra-migrate-meta-layouts":"default","ast-page-background-enabled":"default","ast-page-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"ast-content-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-4)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-4)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-4)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[1153,1831,2056,2054,1879,368,1172,1576],"class_list":["post-490","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-free-thoughts","tag-family","tag-fear","tag-friendship","tag-grief","tag-growth","tag-metacognition","tag-vulnerability","tag-wellbeing"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lucainfante.xyz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/490","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lucainfante.xyz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lucainfante.xyz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lucainfante.xyz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lucainfante.xyz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=490"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lucainfante.xyz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/490\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":491,"href":"https:\/\/lucainfante.xyz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/490\/revisions\/491"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lucainfante.xyz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=490"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lucainfante.xyz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=490"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lucainfante.xyz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=490"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}