#sweet sunshine boy carrying about seven people's worth of stress and worry in his skinny lil body

[thisstableground]

I kinda want to see how Usnavi deal with stress or when he's sad in general. Idk if you mind,,,, just in the mood for angsty stuff,,,,,

why would he deal with stress or sadness when he can just repress it heavily until he has an anxiety breakdown about it?!! 

 i pretty much see him as working in a cycle like that and never quite learning to just share his feelings BEFORE they get overwhelming. i think he was much less anxiety prone when he was a kid/teenager – he had his share of heartaches and stresses and things that upset him, especially when it came to schoolwork, but even when he was struggling he had this optimism at his core that everything would work out okay eventually. he’d talk to his parents or his friends or abuela and know that they’d help him out, he had this kind of confidence in his support system. 

 and then his parents died, and it pretty much changed his entire worldview. for one, it made him a lot more anxious on a daily basis, because now he can’t tell hiimself that everything turns out okay when he knows that sometimes it doesnt and how badly wrong things can go. this is also where i see a lot of his tendency to just kind of freeze up and not know how to act starts: he’s so worried about making the wrong choices and losing someone/something important to him again that he’ll just sit and talk himself in circles for hours without making any progress. and he still trusts his support system as people, but he has this new fear now that somehow he’ll lose them too, so there isn’t quite the same sense of security about it. 

 he was pretty fucked up after it happened and when he’s finally made some progress on recovering from that, that i think he’s very scared of ever ending up in that dark emotional place again. a lot of little habits that crop up whenever he’s feeling particularly bad are ones that started around that time: he’s a stress smoker, and even though he doesn’t smoke regularly theres always periods of a week or two a couple of times a year where he temporarily picks it back up again. he already isn’t the best sleeper but it gets significantly worse when he’s having a bad time so he takes a lot of depression naps to make up for only getting 3 hours of sleep at night. he has a tendency to just kind of disappear without telling people, not on purpose and like obviouslyy he’s still in the store but he’ll suddenly stop answering texts and he’ll cancel socialising plans for no reason. he’s usually way more on the hyperactive side of ADHD but when he’s in a bad place emotionally then he tends to lean way more to inattentive type, just spacing out mid-conversation. 

he always has this worry that if he’s kept hold of these bad habits from after his folks died then what if that means the rest of it could also come back? he hated feeling that way, so he worries that by acknowledging when he’s feeling bad then he’ll be opening a door to the whole thing coming back as hard as it did the first time. and he also knows how much everyone who loves him worried about him during that time and he feels this sense of duty to not put them through that again and to keep them all happy. he puts a lot of his sense of self in being the bubbly, cheerful, silly dude he is and it’s sort of a blow to his sense of identity whenever he’s having a prolonged bad time, so again, just tries to put the happy face on and hope it all blows over. 

he also, i think, feels a very increased need to look after people and to be the caretaker role, partly because he’s trying to make up for his own sense of guilt about his parents, and partly because it just makes him feel more in control of his life, so he isn't as good at letting people take care of him when he feels like he should be taking care of them. usnavi is someone who knows how to work his ass off and he works his ass off at being happy as much as he does with running the store. 

he’s still got a lot of optimism, its just that his life has put a lot of anxieties and mental roadblocks in the way of it: it’s not so much that he believes everything will work out fine the way he used to believe, but more that he so desperately wants everything to be fine and is trying his best to make it happen. i dont think this is always a bad thing: sometimes just telling himself that things will be okay and making himself go about his life as usual and refusing to let lifeget him down does help, because some problems fade away on their own if you don’t give them the time of day.

 but then for recurring/long-lasting problems like money, health, exhaustion, grief etc it’s the exact opposite of helpful, because the problem isn’t going away and so repressing it just means he’s shoving more and more things inside a mental cupboard until eventually the door just bursts open and it all spills out on the floor. that’s like, usnavi freaking out in Hundreds of Stories vibe, where once things start coming out it all comes out at once in a babbling frantic mess. this most often happens in front of abuela because she’s the one he finds most comfort in when he’s feeling like that. 

 its kind of got to the point where everyone just recognises that this is how usnavi works. when he’s going through a bad phase – i think he’s mostly happy now but sometimes life throws shit at him, and i also think that he has a mild case of seasonal affective disorder because winter just reminds him of a lot of bad stuff – then they know eventually it’ll all come out in one big explosion and then he’ll feel better after that, and they just kinda have to wait for it to happen. and usually once he's had a meltdown about it, then he's a lot more receptive to advice or being looked after or like having a decent night's sleep for once.

#in the heights #HOW DID THIS END UP SO LONG #look i just find Sad Usnavi very interesting #sweet sunshine boy carrying about seven people's worth of stress and worry in his skinny lil body #love that thing tumblr does where i answer an ask and it deletes all the paragraphing so i have to go back and add it again #character: usnavi #fandom: ith