"I've read up on it, I don't need to talk"

There's a modern version of carrying it alone, and it feels like the opposite. You've researched the worry. You've read every page about the scan, the debt, the thing at school. You know more about it than your sister would. Telling her would be telling someone who knows less than you do, and what would be the point of that?

Look at what the reading does to the private version. It feeds it. Every page you read about the scan adds outcomes, and the outcomes you remember are the worst ones, because those are the ones that frighten you and fear is what makes things memorable. The reading doesn't put edges on the worry. It removes them, by supplying more of everything the worry could be, and at midnight the search history is a list of the things you've taught yourself to fear.

It's also alone. Reading is the wander with a screen in it. Slepian's finding was about the mind returning to the secret, and a person reading about their worry at one in the morning is returning to it with help. Nothing about the page validates you, in Lepore's sense. It doesn't say "that sounds hard". It doesn't ask when the appointment is. It doesn't notice that you're frightened. It gives you a forum thread in which someone's cousin had the same thing and it went badly, and then it gives you another.

The knowledge isn't the problem. Knowing about the thing is fine, and a debt adviser or a GP would rather you came informed. The problem is that reading has been doing the job telling was supposed to do, and it can't, because the job wasn't information. It was company. You don't need your sister to know more about scans than you do. You need her to know about yours.

So keep what you've learned, and take it to the listener as part of the telling. "I've read everything and I'm frightened" is a good sentence. It tells them where you are. What it can't be is a substitute for saying it to a face, because the face is the part the reading leaves out, and the face is what changes the size.