What Wren Carried — 03: The Weight Is Now Visible

I followed up with him again after that. this time, he told me the latest diagnosis. high red blood cell count. elevated sugar levels, though not urgent, at least for now. he said he was not planning to tell his family. they worry too much.

He sounded exhausted. too tired to sleep. he kept repeating something that stayed with me. that what he was suffering from was not the illness itself, but what his head was telling him. the collapse was not only physical, but mental too.

I remembered how I once wrote about not taking psychological disorders seriously enough. not because I doubted science, but because they had never happened to me. there is a quiet arrogance in believing that if something like that ever happened, you would be able to control it. I wrote about a similar realization before, and it came back to me clearly.

It occurred to me that what he was going through might be the consequence of things long suppressed. things that never had a chance to surface. looking back at our friendship, I realized he was the kind of person who keeps everything inside. he absorbs difficulty without reacting, postpones processing, choosing silence instead of release.

What he described did not feel like simple physical pain. It felt like a battle happening internally. He never named the demons he was fighting. At least not yet. but they were there, shaping his nights, exhausting his days.

I shared with him something I had written during a time when I went through a similar collapse . A period marked by a cascade of misfortune, when my nervous system finally overrode me and forced a pause I refused to take myself. when your body decides to rest on your behalf , it rarely does so gently, when it does, you will are not going to like it. It was one of the most frightening experiences I have lived through.

After reading it, he told me he was glad he reached out. he started sending screenshots of lines from the piece, saying things like, this is exactly what was in my head, and I never thought someone else would relate to this. I felt relief then. he had found himself between the lines. he was no longer alone inside his thoughts.

Western medicine is powerful. necessary. But what he seemed to be receiving was treatment focused almost entirely on physiological measurements. numbers. levels. Yes, the antidepressant suggested an awareness that his nervous system was not regulated, and that they were careful enough to give it a look, that something beneath the surface was wrong. but there was no follow up that resembled real psychological care.

I was fortunate once. I had my sister, a doctor who also understood how psychological strain can spill into the body. she helped me learn the language of social anxiety, panic attacks, and anxious spirals. I learned that many people reach a point where what they carry in their minds can no longer stay contained, and begins to leak and manifest into the body.