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She remembered a term she learned in a linguistics class for the way a word stops making sense if you stare at it for too long: semantic evacuation.
People who don’t know the term semantic evacuation sometimes call this feeling depression.
There has never been, in the history of all human interaction, a way for a woman to explain effectively that she’s calm when a man has suggested she isn’t.
The anxiety and fear were the only things that were real to him; they were the only things that never abandoned him. And when everyone else got to feel them, too, well, that was when he could finally relax.
Or, put more simply, in order to be a normal person, you had to at least see normal people.