There are nights when the weight of the world doesn’t crash. It seeps. Slow. Subtle. Quiet, until it isn't. Until you look around and realize your body’s moving on autopilot and your brain’s made a sudden, silent demand: We are doing this now.
“This,” of course, can be anything.
Reorganizing the entire bookshelf by color.
Cleaning out five years of saved notes and screenshots.
Creating a spreadsheet to rank fictional characters by emotional damage and snack preferences.
Researching the historical accuracy of corsetry at 2:38am.
Creating mood boards for a story you haven’t even started yet.
It doesn’t matter what the “this” is. What matters is that it’s happening. Right now.
And no, it’s not productive in the traditional sense. There’s no finish line. No gold star. You don’t walk away from it with anything you can hold up and say, “See? I’m better now.” But in those moments, that hyperfocus isn’t about the end result—it’s about the anchor. It’s about staying tethered to something when everything else feels like it might slip away.
People love to label it a quirk. A funny little spiral. And maybe from the outside, it does look a bit absurd—intensely focusing on some random, niche task while the world burns quietly outside your door. But inside? It’s not a joke.
It’s regulation.
When my brain is on overload, when the noise has outpaced my ability to process it, hyperfixation becomes a kind of refuge. A single thread I can hold when I can’t take the whole fabric. It’s the one room in the mental house that isn’t on fire.
I don’t choose these fixations. They arrive unannounced, urgent and irrational, and yet they calm me more effectively than most things that are supposed to. I’ve learned not to fight them. If my brain needs to rebuild my entire writing archive at 3am, I let it. If I suddenly feel compelled to rewatch all three seasons of a canceled show and document character arcs in a Google doc no one will ever see, I do it.
Because sometimes, rest doesn’t look like stillness. Sometimes it looks like focus so intense it becomes a shield. And if that focus happens to be on something objectively ridiculous—so what?
Rest doesn’t need to be noble. It doesn’t need to be socially acceptable or Instagrammable or even explainable. It just needs to work.
And for me, that often means throwing myself into a task so specific and offbeat that my brain can finally stop buzzing long enough to settle. Not forever. Not even for long. Just for now.
That “now” is everything.
So no, I’m not wasting time. I’m not avoiding reality. I’m just giving my mind what it needs in the language it understands. Control. Curiosity. Clarity through hyper-focus.
And when I come back to center—because I do come back—it’s often with a little more breath in my lungs. A little more softness in my chest. A little more energy to face whatever real-life thing is still waiting for me.
So if you catch me knee-deep in an obsessively detailed chart comparing Gothic horror tropes across media formats, just let me have it.
It’s not chaos. It’s rest.
Just… my version.
