Without Reason

The water is running over me in a steady, familiar way, hitting my shoulders and tracing down my back in lines that should feel ordinary. The sound fills the space completely, soft but constant, like it is meant to be the only thing I am paying attention to.

For a while, I stay inside that. Inside the routine of it. The warmth, the steam gathering against the tile, the way everything blurs slightly at the edges. 

And then it comes.

Not as a thought, but as a collapse inward, like something in me turns on itself and suddenly everything feels too heavy to hold. It is an overwhelming, unexplainable pain that fills my body completely, as if the feeling of being wrong has become physical and there is nowhere left inside me for it to go.

 I stood still trying to understand it, like I could think my way out of it.

I kept searching for something that caused it.

A moment.
A mistake.
Something I could name.

But there was nothing.

The day had been normal.
Nothing had happened.

And that made it worse.

Because if nothing had happened, then it meant the feeling was not coming from outside me.

It was me.

Something inside me turning on itself again.

That’s what shame does.

It doesn’t arrive like an event.

It arrives like truth.

And once it’s there, it starts rewriting everything quietly.

The way I stood.
The way I spoke.
The way I didn’t speak.
The way I hesitated.
The way I existed without realizing I was being measured by something I couldn’t see.

Everything becomes evidence.

Everything becomes proof.

Proof that I am not enough.
Proof that I am too much.
Proof that something about me is wrong in a way I can’t fix because I can’t even fully understand it.

And in that moment, under the water, I could feel it reaching that point where it wasn’t even thought anymore.

It was just pain.

Pure emotional pain that had nowhere to go except inward.

It filled my chest so completely I could feel it in my throat, in my stomach, in the way I was holding myself still without realizing I had stopped moving at all.

I try to breathe like it would change something.

Like breathing normally meant I was normal.

Like standing there long enough without falling apart would prove something different.

But nothing changed.

It doesn’t change.

And I hated that there was no reason I could find. No clear cause I could undo. No explanation that would make it smaller.

Because if there was a reason, I could fix it.

But there wasn’t.

There never is.

Just the return of it.

Quiet.
Certain.
Familiar in a way that makes it feel like it has always been there, waiting for me to notice it again.

And I stayed there, under the water, trying to hold myself together inside something that didn’t have edges.

Just feeling it.
Fully.
Helplessly.
Like it had already decided what I was.

Before I ever got a say.