For years, I used anxious people as my benchmark.
You know the ones: visibly stressed, catastrophising, spiralling in group chats at midnight. I wasn't doing that. I was managing. I was functional. I got up, got the kids ready, caught the ferry into Central, answered emails, kept the plates spinning. I looked at myself against those people and thought: I'm fine. I'm actually pretty calm.
That was the bar I was using. Not-visibly-falling-apart. That was my definition of calm.
I held that belief for a long time. Through the marketing career I eventually left, through motherhood, through the relentless logistics of life in Hong Kong with two small boys and a ferry schedule that doesn't care how your morning went. I thought my baseline was fine. Normal. Manageable.
It took lying on a table, fully clothed, doing nothing, to find out how wrong I was.
The first few sessions, I didn't feel much. That's the honest account. I noticed I could slow down my breathing. I noticed I felt a bit less scattered afterward. But it wasn't dramatic, and I wasn't expecting dramatic. I filed it under: useful, probably. Continued on.
And then one day (I don't remember which session it was, or even what had been happening in my life that week) I sat up at the end of a session and something was different. I felt calm. Not I've-had-a-glass-of-wine calm, not I-just-had-a-moment-to-myself calm. Something quieter and more solid than that. I felt present. I felt like I was fully inside my own body, which sounds strange because where else would I be, but that's the only way I can describe it.
I remember thinking: oh.
And then I remember thinking: why don't I feel like this all the time?
And then, right behind that: what have I actually been feeling all this time?
That's when I started to look back at what I'd been calling calm.
There was a low hum. I'd always had it: that kind of background readiness, the sense of waiting for the next thing to go wrong. Not panic, nothing like panic. Just... vigilance. An alertness that never fully switched off. I'd wake up in the morning and the day's logistics would be already loading before I'd had a single conscious thought. I moved through everything with a slight brace in my body that I'd never named because it had never occurred to me that it needed naming.
It was just how things felt. It was all I knew.
That's the part that still catches me a little: not that I'd been carrying it, but that I'd had no idea. I wasn't suppressing it or ignoring it. I genuinely didn't know it was there. I had no reference point. When you've never tasted anything but salt, you don't know you've been tasting salt. It's just what food is.
The comparison I kept making to other people, the well, I'm not like that. I can see now that I was comparing my insides to other people's outsides, and I was comparing all of it to the wrong thing. The question was never whether I was visibly anxious. The question was: what's actually happening in here?
I'm not going to tell you I had some breakthrough moment of catharsis and tears and everything changed. It wasn't like that. It was more like a gradual correction of vision, like realising you've been slightly squinting for years, and then one day you're not. The image is the same. The effort required to see it is completely different.
What surprised me most wasn't the calm itself. It was how quiet it was. I think I expected calm to feel like relief, like something lifting or releasing, some dramatic before-and-after. But it wasn't relief. It was just... absence of effort. The absence of bracing. The absence of that hum.
It was so quiet I almost didn't notice it.
I remember sitting there, feeling it, and thinking: this is what I thought I already had.
I don't share this because I've figured it out, or because I sit permanently in some enlightened state (I absolutely do not. I have two kids and I live on an island and I'm on the 7:40 ferry more mornings than I'd like). I share it because I spent a long time convinced I didn't need to look more closely. I was managing. I was fine.
I wonder sometimes how many of us are using the wrong baseline. How many of us have been feeling something for so long that we've stopped noticing we're feeling it.
If you ever catch yourself thinking I'm not anxious, I'm just..., I'd gently offer that the just might be worth sitting with.
