Some of Us Were Never Given a Baseline

I thought I had asthma. Bad asthma—the kind that puts you in the hospital for a week. Twice.
The second time, I was 15. At the ER, the doctor was surprised I was still conscious—let alone calm—with my blood oxygen that low.

I wasn’t calm because things were okay. I was calm because my body didn’t recognize crisis as unusual.
It took me until my mid-20s to realize it wasn’t asthma. It was anxiety—or more accurately, a nervous system that never learned how to turn off. It took me another 20 years—and therapy—to even begin learning how to regulate it.

When you grow up in a stable environment, your body learns a rhythm. Stress comes, then it goes. There’s a return to baseline. But if stability isn’t there—if the people around you can’t regulate themselves, if tension is constant—your system adapts.

It doesn’t learn how to rest. It learns how to scan.

I didn’t have a baseline. I had survival mode.

Rest wasn’t neutral. It was wrong. There was always something to do, something to fix, something to anticipate. Being still felt like failure—like laziness, like inviting trouble. So I stayed in motion.

And when I wasn’t moving, I was calculating. Every word mattered. Every shift in tone meant something. I learned how to read the room before the room turned on me. I learned how to stay just ahead of whatever might explode.

For a long time, I thought I was the problem. That I was too sensitive, too anxious, too much. That if I could just calm down, everything would be fine.

But I wasn’t the problem. I was reacting to something I had no control over.
That’s what environments like that do. They don’t just hurt you—they shape you.
And those patterns don’t stay in childhood.

When the environment around you is unstable—when messaging shifts constantly, when tension never resolves, when there’s a steady drip of crisis—you don’t relax. You scan for what’s next. You start checking for the next thing, the next escalation, the next shift. Your body stays on.

Not because you’re broken. Because you were trained to pay attention.

The problem is, your body doesn’t know when the training is no longer needed. So it keeps scanning—even when there’s nothing left to survive. It carries that pattern into quiet moments, into relationships that aren’t threats, into a life that no longer looks like the one that shaped you.

And after a while, you stop questioning it. You assume this is just who you are. Your personality. Your wiring.

Your normal.

It isn’t.

It’s training.

That doesn’t make it easy to undo. But it changes what you’re actually dealing with. You’re not broken. You’re carrying something that made sense once—in a place that no longer exists.

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