Chronic Overthinking & Flushing Tampons Down the Toilet

I am a chronic worrier. The moment energy spikes in my life, whether through excitement, pressure, or simply change, I feel the ground beneath me shift, as though it has become unstable without warning. I spiral into the certainty that I am getting something wrong, that I have miscalculated or misstepped, and that everyone around me is quietly recalibrating their perception of me in ways I will never fully grasp. It is a suffocating self-awareness, an inescapable loop of second-guessing every word I say, every action I take.

I exist in a paradox. I overanalyze everything, yet it does not lead to greater precision in my choices. I scrutinize my thoughts and still blurt them out. I obsess over my impact on others but remain reckless in my vulnerability. I move through the world on instinct, but in the aftermath I unravel, convincing myself I have left behind a trail of misinterpretation, disappointment, or, worst of all, proof that I am not enough. Or perhaps too much.

And yet, despite all of this, my worry does not paralyze me. I am not the kind of anxious person who becomes frozen in uncertainty. I make the choices I was always going to make. I say the things that demand to be said. I live in the way that feels true to me. But once the moment has passed, once the words have left my mouth and the action is irreversible, the weight of my own overanalysis crashes down. The relentless, aching need to understand how I am perceived consumes me.

What unsettles me most is that my fears are often justified. That gnawing feeling, the suspicion that something is off; that I have misread the room, overstayed my welcome in someone’s good graces, or cracked a foundation I didn’t even know was fragile, frequently turns out to be true. But then I wonder if I caused these things. Did I sense something real, or did I manifest it? Did I press too hard, ask too many times, force people into their discomfort simply by naming it?

I am the most chill-seeming un-chill person I know. I have mastered the art of appearing at ease while a tempest rages inside me.

So all that being said, here is something I’ve been fixating on today. And that is the fact that I recently learned you cannot flush tampons down the toilet.

There are certain revelations in life that feel less like learning something new and more like discovering you’ve been walking around with your shirt inside out for 23 years. Finding out at this embarrassingly advanced stage of my existence that you are not supposed to flush tampons down the toilet was one of those moments.

I had told a friend I flush tampons down the toilet. I thought that was normal… decidedly it was not. "You flush them?"

Cue the horror. The mental spiral. The immediate reexamination of every toilet I had ever used, every unseen pipe I had unknowingly burdened with my ignorance. Had I been singlehandedly responsible for the great plumbing crises of my youth? Had some poor maintenance worker, somewhere, cursed my name while dismantling a drain? The weight of this newfound knowledge pressed down on me with the force of every overthought conversation, every social misstep, every questionable life choice that I had dissected into oblivion while this very basic fact had somehow escaped my scrutiny.

It’s humbling, really. A reminder that for all the mental energy I devote to worrying about whether I am unknowingly making some grand social faux pas, my real crimes against civility are likely happening in the depths of some unsuspecting sewer system.