Sometimes I think love changes shape before we even notice it. You start out open and sure, feeling seen in a way that feels new, and then slowly the balance shifts. It’s not one moment or one fight. More like a steady wearing down, quiet things you stop saying, small things you overlook because they don’t seem worth the argument. And then at some point you realize you’ve been adjusting who you are just to keep the peace. It’s strange how the need to feel close can make silence feel safer than honesty. You tell yourself this is what love …
The Slow Climb Back to Okay
Sometimes I forget that feelings can’t really see ahead. They only know what’s happening right now, and right now might be a mess. When things have gone wrong for too long, your mind starts learning the wrong lesson — that the bad stretch is permanent, that maybe this is the shape of life now.It doesn’t shout it, it just hums underneath everything, quiet and believable. And then there are these tiny moments where you notice a breeze or someone asks how you’ve been and you don’t know what to say because you realize you’ve been carrying this …
Soft Exits
What I Learned When I Stopped Fighting My Own Head
Some mornings I wake up already tired, not in my body exactly, more in my head, like the thinking part started early and the rest of me is still catching up, and I can feel it pulling me into half-written emails, old conversations, small things that shouldn’t matter much but somehow carry weight anyway. It doesn’t feel intense or loud, just constant, like something that’s always been part of the room, part of the air, part of how the day starts, and because it’s familiar I usually don’t question it. For a long time I assumed this was …
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You Moved On Too Fast
I’m quicker with sentences than I think I am. Something ends, I give it a name, and that naming feels useful in a very ordinary way, like putting a lid on something so I can carry on without checking it every few minutes. I don’t sit there choosing to do this. It happens before I notice. What I notice comes later. I’ll be in the middle of the day and realise I’m still holding myself a bit tightly, or staying alert when there isn’t much to pay attention to, and it feels slightly off because, in my head, that moment was already wrapped up. …
Still Learning to Leave Working Things Alone
I keep bumping into this gap between what I already know works and what I still find myself reaching for, and it doesn’t feel like a contradiction so much as a habit I haven’t outgrown yet. On some level, I understand that the things that actually build over time tend to be repetitive and fairly plain, the kind of actions you can do without much thinking once you’ve learned them, and yet there’s another part of me that keeps waiting for effort to feel more alive than that. The discomfort doesn’t show up as overwhelm. It’s subtler. A kind of …
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Standing at the Back of My Own Line
I’ve been trying to name a feeling that doesn’t really want a name. It’s not exhaustion exactly, and it’s not confusion either. Days move along, things get done, and if you asked me what I did, I could tell you without lying. Still, there’s this sense that I’m slightly out of frame in my own life, close enough to be involved, not close enough to feel fully there. Like I’m walking alongside my intentions instead of inside them. I notice it most in how easily I adjust without thinking. Someone else’s urgency sets the tempo. Someone else’s …
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The Second That Stayed
I was already sitting there, screen open, cursor blinking in that patient way it always does, and this should have been the easiest part, the part where you just start and let the rest sort itself out, except my body stayed put, not frozen, not resisting, just not moving forward yet. That surprised me more than it should have, because until then I’d trusted starting to take care of itself. I’d built my days on that trust. Sit down, begin, let momentum do the boring, useful work of carrying me through. Even when I felt tired, that first step …