Amara Evans

About

What has struck me most over the years is how often the people affected are the last to know. Everybody around them has noticed the alertness, the scanning, the way they position themselves in a room, and nobody has mentioned it because it reads as ordinary caution. So it goes unexamined for decades. Hypervigilance is invisible from the inside exactly because it feels like accurate perception rather than a setting that has been turned up. There is no obvious moment at which a person would think to question it. We make it visible first, and naming it is really the larger part of the work. Administration occupied me for a time before this, and what I noticed there is that the most burdened people were reliably the least aware of it. If someone has commented on how alert you are, get in touch. Being told you seem alert is worth taking seriously.