I Have Been All of Them
I know what a flooded nervous system feels like.
I know the moment when the gap between what happens and how you respond collapses — not because you chose it to, but because the load exceeded the system.
Most of the time there’s space.
Distance between stimulus and action.
A buffer. A breath. A choice.
And then sometimes there isn’t.
Sometimes the pressure stacks faster than interpretation.
Sometimes the body decides before the story arrives.
Sometimes you are already moving before you know what you are moving toward or away from.
I don’t need to imagine this.
I’ve lived it.
I have been a tyrant.
I have been a bully.
I have taken what wasn’t mine.
I have hidden.
I have frozen.
I have acted bravely without knowing why.
I have hurt people I loved.
I have protected people at cost to myself.
None of these identities required a different soul.
They required different pressure.
⸻
There is a comforting lie we tell ourselves:
that character precedes action.
It doesn’t.
Not reliably.
Not under load.
Character is what emerges when the system has margin.
When the margin collapses, what you see is not virtue or vice — it’s capacity.
⸻
When the nervous system floods, there is no narrator.
No judge.
No philosopher.
There is only orientation or loss of it.
Safety or threat.
Move or freeze.
People talk about intent because intent is what makes sense afterwards.
Intent is how we explain ourselves back into coherence.
But in the moment of overload, intent is a luxury item.
⸻
This is what most people don’t want to admit — not because it’s obscure, but because it’s too close:
Under sufficient pressure, you are capable of things that will later horrify you.
Not because you are secretly evil.
But because you are finite.
The same nervous system that allows love, courage, loyalty, and care
also contains the machinery for domination, violence, panic, and retreat.
Evolution didn’t give us two systems — a good one and a bad one.
It gave us one, and asked it to do everything.
⸻
We are taught to believe that monsters do harm.
But most harm is done by overwhelmed organisms trying — badly — to regain control.
That doesn’t make the harm unreal.
It doesn’t soften the damage.
It doesn’t spare responsibility.
But it does change what the danger actually is.
The danger is not “bad people”.
The danger is load without margin.
Pressure without containment.
Systems pushed past their design limits and then judged as if they were intact.
⸻
I have watched myself become someone I didn’t recognise.
Not metaphorically.
Physiologically.
Heart racing. Vision narrowed. Language gone.
Actions happening faster than explanation.
Afterwards, there is shame — not the theatrical kind, but the muting kind.
The kind that makes speech feel impossible.
The kind that turns memory into shards.
You don’t replay it to excuse it.
You replay it because you are trying to understand how you did that.
That question has no easy answer.
⸻
We prefer stories where the line between “us” and “them” is clean.
Where violence belongs to villains.
Where collapse is a moral defect.
Where judgment restores order.
Those stories make us feel safe.
They are also false.
Because the real line runs through every human nervous system, and it shifts with circumstance.
⸻
If you want fewer people crossing it, you don’t start with condemnation.
You start with load.
With pressure.
With misrecognition.
With environments that strip margin faster than they offer support.
You start earlier than blame is comfortable.
⸻
I am not asking you to forgive anyone.
I am asking you to stop pretending that the machinery which failed in them does not exist in you.
Because the moment you believe that —
the moment you need monsters —
you guarantee that you will be surprised again.
⸻
If you want justice, learn what breaks people before they break others.
If you want safety, stop worshipping character and start respecting limits.
And if you want truth, be honest about this:
You are not one thing.
You are a system under conditions.
So am I.
So is everyone.