Traumatic Hypervigilance
I am sixty-seven years old
and my body is still standing watch.
Still listening for the sound
that once meant everything would change.
My eyes search faces
before words arrive.
My ears collect danger
even from kindness.
Rest has always felt like a rumor,
never like a promise.
I learned safety the hard way—
by losing it early,
by learning that quiet could erupt,
that love could carry sharp edges,
that the world does not always announce
when it is about to wound you.
Autism tuned my senses like instruments
no one taught me how to mute.
Light too loud.
Voices too bright.
Emotions arriving without a translator.
So I learned to stay ready.
Always ready.
This is not paranoia.
This is memory with a pulse.
This is trauma that never received
an official ending.
My heart is tired
from guarding a child
who no longer lives in my bones—
yet still lives in my reflexes.
I flinch in rooms that mean me no harm.
I apologize to silence.
I brace for storms in clear weather.
Traumatic hypervigilance
is love that learned fear before language.
It is care sharpened into armor.
It is devotion to survival
that never learned how to retire.
And still—
some nights I manage a small mercy.
A breath that lands without alarm.
A moment when my shoulders forget
they were once shields.
A second when my pulse loosens its grip
on tomorrow.
Therapy, time, poetry,
the slow persuasion of safety—
they do not cure.
They teach.
They whisper to the nervous system:
“You are allowed to be here now.”
I am not broken.
I am over-protective of life.
I am what happens
when survival becomes permanent.
And I am still learning—
in my seventh decade—
that rest is not surrender,
that peace is not a trick,
that standing down
does not betray who I had to become.
Surrounded by thousands of killers,
without a single weapon.
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