Waiting for the Other Shoe to Drop

Notes on hypervigilance.

You feel it before you can name it.

You tell yourself to relax, but your body won’t listen.

Your mind keeps spinning quiet disasters. Someone’s mad at you, something bad is coming in the mail, someone is about to call with news that will change everything. It’s not just anxiety—it’s prophecy. You know something is coming. The air even seems heavier, like a storm that’s just barely out of view.

Nothing has happened—yet. But your body doesn’t believe that. It remembers. There’s an ancient intelligence in you that doesn’t care what the facts are. It cares about the pattern. And the pattern says: When things are going well, get ready for them to come crashing down.

On the surface, you are composed and competent. But underneath, your mind is busy running silent simulations: rehearsing bad news, crafting exits, scanning the horizon. Because you’re not just living your life—you’re pre-processing grief that hasn’t arrived yet.

To distract yourself, you go about your day. You answer emails. You text a meme to a friend. You stand in the kitchen making a smoothie, and everything is fine. Really—it’s fine. The sun is out. Your to-do list isn’t too overwhelming. You have a moment where you think, Hey, maybe things are turning around.

But then, mid-scroll or mid-step, you remember. The other shoe still hasn’t dropped!

That’s right. Everything’s not fine, or at least it won’t be for long.

There’s always a question hovering just below the surface: How long will this interlude last?

You learn to move carefully. To monitor, interpret, decode. You call it being “sensitive,” or “high-strung,” or “just the way you are,” but what it really is… is vigilance. Trained in you, burned in. The logical consequence of too many shoes dropping, too many times you didn’t see it coming before.

And this time you know: don’t trust the calm before the storm.

It’s like living in a state of pre-impact.

There’s an invisible countdown ticking somewhere out of sight. You don’t know how long is left, just that something is coming, and it’s not good.

And you wish, in some strange way, that whatever’s coming would just show up already—just drop the other shoe!—so you can stop waiting, stop bracing, and start breathing again.

But you don’t control the timing of these things. So you wait, and you watch, and you remain alert.

It’s exhausting.