Most thoughts arrive with a point of view.
This one arrives pretending to be neutral:
“Maybe they are just busy.”
It sounds calm.
Reasonable.
A tidy line placed over something you have not examined yet.
So we lay it on the table and open it up.
Incision One: The Trigger
It begins with a pause that lasts longer than you expected.
A message viewed but not answered.
A plan that drifts without follow-up.
A tone that felt fine earlier but now sits slightly out of place.
There is no crisis.
Just a gap your system does not know how to label.
The nervous system dislikes gaps.
It will label them before it understands them.
Incision Two: The Function
This thought is not a belief.
It is a stabiliser.
Its job is to slow things down.
Not to tell the truth.
Not to reassure you in any meaningful way.
Only to keep your mind from sprinting too far ahead of the facts.
It is a temporary explanation.
A cardboard version of clarity.
Just enough structure to stop the panic from climbing.
It is meant to buy time.
Not certainty.
Incision Three: The Distortion
Silence is almost never neutral.
If you learned to monitor mood shifts early in life, silence can feel like a warning.
If you grew around unpredictable reactions, silence can feel like a test.
If you were trained to anticipate withdrawal, silence can feel like the first step.
This is how the distortion enters:
Your past evaluates the present faster than you do.
The brain dislikes uncertainty so much that it inserts whatever it knows best, even if the data is old.
What you fear is not the pause itself.
It is what the pause resembles.
Incision Four: The Hidden Layer
Here is the surprising part.
Assuming someone is annoyed with you is not low self-esteem.
It is vigilance.
Your system would rather be wrong in the direction of caution than wrong in the direction of trust.
That bias once kept you safe.
The thought “maybe they are busy” is not optimism.
It is the mind attempting to update an old rule with a new one it has not fully learned.
A form of self-correction.
Clumsy, but genuine.
Incision Five: The Diagnosis
This is not emotional overreaction.
It is residue.
Your nervous system still behaves as if silence must be interpreted immediately.
The reassurance thought appears when part of you is trying to shift from the old rule,
“silence means trouble,”
towards the quieter rule,
“silence is information I do not have yet.”
You are not panicking.
You are recalibrating.
That is all.
Notes
Header Photo by Dogancan Ozturan on Unsplash