Why You Shut Down When It Gets *Too Real*

And what to do when you’re finally ready to feel again

Hey, I think I shut down when things get hard. Can we hang out sometime?

Jules stared at that single, trembling sentence for twenty-two minutes before he thumbed Send.
No emoji. No lol. No jokey buffer to blunt the edge. Just that: a raw, exquisite risk sent into the silence of a Wednesday night in early March.

It was 11:03 p.m. The apartment hummed—radiat…