In this psychological short story about anxiety, fear isn’t loud, it hums quietly through the house.
I want us to imagine for a moment that anxiety was never a feeling,
but a frequency
a low vibration threading through the house,
settling in the pipes, the walls,
the pauses between her mother’s sentences.
You could feel it on you, in you,
woven into every movement,
every thought.
It never stopped.
At night, it grew louder.
The hum of the refrigerator.
The distant rush of passing cars.
Her mother whispering softly to no one,
a conversation she could never quite follow.
The air itself felt fragile,
as if one wrong sound could make it crack.
So she learned to move quietly,
to listen more than speak,
to sense the shift before it arrived.
There was love in that house,
but it came with conditions.
Love that vanished if the tone changed.
Love that smelled like medication and burnt tea.
Now, years later, she calls it anxiety.
Her body has learned the vocabulary
her childhood never had.
And when the world goes quiet,
the hum still returns –
not as fear,
but as memory.
Anxiety doesn’t always arrive as chaos, sometimes it shows up quietly, disguised as care. It lives in the pauses, in the held breath before a door opens, in the way you listen for someone’s tone before you speak. It’s learned slowly, through repetition. Long before we have the word for anxiety, our bodies already know its language.
We adapt to the people around us. We tune ourselves to their moods, like a radio trying to catch the right signal. Over time, those frequencies become our own. What once kept us safe starts to feel like who we are, mistaking vigilance for love, or alertness for connection. And after a while, it gets confusing. What do we actually feel when we’re not scanning the room?
But healing has a rhythm too. Through reflection, therapy, or just the quiet habit of writing things down, we can start to retune. The body begins to tell the difference between danger and memory, between being alert and truly being alive. The hum doesn’t vanish it just softens, changing into something steadier. Something that, if you listen closely, almost sounds like peace.
If you liked this short story about anxiety, you might also like Maybe the Narrative Was Never Yours to Begin With ✨
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