Some Nights the Old Feeling Comes Back

It’s 3am.

And there it is.

The same feeling that plagued me four years ago… sitting in my chest and moving into my gut like it never left. Like all the work, all the learning, all the tools I have spent years gathering meant nothing in this particular darkness.

That is the thing nobody tells you about healing.

It is not linear.
It is not a destination.
And knowing the techniques does not make you immune to the 3am.

The Familiar Stranger

There is something deeply disorienting about feeling something you thought you had moved past.

You have done the work. You are doing the work. You have sat with teachers, studied the science, learned to breathe through what once would have swallowed you whole. And then one morning, before the sun, before the house wakes up, before the world has any demands of you…something shifts inside.

And the old feeling is back.

Not as a failure.
Not as evidence that none of it worked.
But as a visitor. Familiar. Unwelcome. And somehow, if you can find the steadiness to sit with it, also important.

I got up. Walked around. Went downstairs. Grabbed something to drink. Shook my head at myself.

And then I made a different choice than I would have four years ago.

I let myself feel it.

It Is Always a Symptom

Here is what I know now that I didn't know then.

The anxiety at 3am is never just anxiety.

It is always a symptom. Something off in the body that the nervous system translates into unease before the mind can catch up. The inability to breathe. The inability to settle. The feeling that the floor has shifted beneath you and you cannot find solid ground.

For me, and for many people with celiac disease, that symptom has a very specific origin.

The gut.

I was glutened months ago. And while I have felt fine on the surface, functional, present, moving through my days, there are moments like this one that remind me how long the gut actually takes to heal. How deceptive recovery can feel. How the microbiome can be quietly rebuilding itself for months while the body sends small dispatches that something is still not quite right.

That is the invisible reality of celiac disease that most people never see.

Accidental gluten exposure doesn't resolve in a week. It shifts the microbiome in ways that ripple forward, affecting absorption, disrupting the gut-brain axis, altering neurotransmitter production and cortisol regulation in ways that surface as anxiety, mood shifts, and neurological symptoms that feel completely disconnected from a meal that happened months ago.

They are not disconnected.
They never were.

This is not weakness.
This is biology.
This is the body still doing the quiet work of healing long after the obvious symptoms have passed.

Why My Inner World Shakes Me

Growing up, my inner world was all I had.

The outside was not safe. The outside was unpredictable and sometimes dangerous and not a place I could rely on. So I went inside. I built something there, a world that was mine, that nobody could touch, that remained steady when everything around me was not.

My inner world was my refuge.

So when something goes wrong inside, when the gut shifts and the anxiety surfaces and the 3am feeling arrives without warning…it shakes me to my core in a way that is hard to explain.

Because if my inner world is not safe, where do I go?

That question is old. It is childhood old. It is the question of a little girl who learned that the only safe place was somewhere nobody else could reach.

And at 3am, that little girl and this woman sit together at the kitchen table.

One not knowing what was coming.
One knowing so much more.
Both just trying to breathe.

What the 3am Looks Like Now

I sit with my tea. I do the techniques. They help in waves, not completely, not all at once, but enough.

I breathe. I write. I remind myself that this feeling is a symptom, not a sentence.

That the gut will settle. That the microbiome is resilient. That the nervous system trained now with intentional work, knows things it did not know four years ago.

And I sit here…a different person than the one who first felt this feeling…holding space for both versions of myself.

The one who didn't know. And the one who does.

Both of them real. Both of them valid. Both of them deserving of gentleness.

For Everyone Still Doing the Work

If you woke up at 3am this week. If the old feeling came back and you shook your head at yourself. If you wondered whether all the work you have done actually matters when the darkness still finds you:

It matters.

The difference between then and now is not the absence of hard feelings. It is what you do when they arrive.

Four years ago I did not have the tools. I did not have the language. I did not know that the anxiety was a symptom of something physical. I did not know how to sit with myself in the dark without being swallowed by it.

Now I do. Not perfectly. But enough. And enough is everything at 3am.

We are all continuing to do the work.

One breath. One moment. One 3am at a time.

And the fact that you are still here…still feeling, still trying, still choosing to understand rather than numb, is not a sign that healing hasn't happened.

It is proof that it has.