What carrying it costs you

I've argued the mechanism. This chapter is the bill, and it's paid mostly at night.

The wander. Slepian's participants whose minds went most often to their secrets had lower wellbeing, worse relationships, less sense of being themselves and poorer physical health, and the wandering did that independently of any concealing. Forty returns a day, for a month, is twelve hundred small costs, and you've been paying them alone.

The sleep. The private version doesn't keep office hours. Three in the morning is when it's largest, because there's nothing else in the room, and a month of three in the mornings is a month of days lived tired, and the tiredness gets explained as work.

The distance. You've been saying "fine" to the people closest to you for a month. Each "fine" is a small door closed, and they can hear it close. The people you're protecting are the people you've been most distant from, and they've felt it, and they don't know why, and they may have concluded it's them.

The decisions made alone. The letter has been answered, or not, by one person doing arithmetic at night. The scan has been waited for by one person. Whatever you've decided about the marriage, you've decided it without the one other adult who has a say. Decisions made alone in a bad month are worse decisions than the same person would make with a second mind on a Tuesday afternoon.

The size. Chapter 6 said the private version has no edges. A month of carrying it has let it fill the space, and it's now larger than the thing itself, and you're frightened of a thing that's partly your own month.

The help not had. Every worry has a step in it that a second person would have seen sooner. The debt adviser. The appointment. The question to the school. Carried alone, the step gets taken late or not at all, and the lateness is a cost that compounds. The letter unanswered for a month is a letter with a month's interest on it, and the interest was the price of the silence.

The self. Slepian's participants reported feeling less authentic, and I think that's the plainest word for it. A person who's saying "fine" and isn't, for a month, is living as two people, and the one who's talking isn't the one who's awake at three.

None of this is the cost of the worry. The worry has its own cost, and the telling doesn't remove that. This is the cost of carrying it alone, on top, and it's the part that one conversation takes away.