By the time Leena turned thirty-two, she had perfected the art of looking functional while feeling like a browser with twenty open tabs. Nothing crashed, but everything lagged. You could talk to her and she’d reply intelligently, but inside her mind tiny fires burned in places she hadn’t checked in months.
The unraveling began in a grocery store aisle — an unglamorous place for a life shift, but most turning points choose inconvenience over drama. She was staring at a shelf of lentils, comparing the same two packets she always bought. A man next to her reached for the cheapest brand without hesitation. She watched his hand move and felt a sting of envy so sharp it surprised her. Not envy for the lentils, but for the decisiveness. His nervous system clearly trusted the world. Hers treated every choice like a contract negotiation.
That night she sat on her couch, unusually aware of her own restlessness. She had done nothing dramatic that day, yet her body felt like it had run an emotional marathon. The strange part was how normal this had become. She lived her whole life in a state of quiet hypervigilance, scanning for cues, predicting tone shifts, drafting alternative timelines in her head. It made her good at her job, good at reading people, good at preparing for imaginary emergencies — and very bad at resting.
Her fatigue wasn’t about laziness. It was the exhaustion of being on guard even when no one was threatening her.
People who haven’t lived like this always underestimate how tiring it is to constantly anticipate what comes next.
The first real rupture came a week later. She woke up already bracing for a day that hadn’t happened. Her thoughts sprinted before her eyes opened. She tried making a list. Lists usually gave her a sense of control. But that morning, the list mocked her. Every line felt like proof that her life was a fragile ecosystem held together by willpower alone.
She pulled the covers over her head — a theatrical, childish move that felt embarrassingly honest.
She wasn’t sad. She wasn’t panicking. She was exhausted from thinking too much about everything and nothing.
Later that evening, something shifted again — not a breakthrough, just an unexpected interruption. Her neighbour’s seven-year-old knocked on her door, proudly holding a paper plane he wanted to show off. He tossed it down her hallway. It crashed instantly. He shrugged like it was part of the design, picked it up, and threw it again.
Leena hadn’t seen that kind of casual failure-handling in years. The plane hit the wall four times and he still didn’t tense up. The kid lived in a world that didn’t punish imperfection. Watching him felt like someone was rubbing balm on a bruise she didn’t know she had.
That night she tried something unfamiliar: she let one thought finish before the next one barged in. It sounds simple, but her brain usually layered thoughts like transparent acetate sheets — worries overlapping with memories overlapping with future predictions. Taking them one at a time felt like trying to slow down a runaway train using only her breath.
The attempt didn’t “fix” anything, but it did introduce friction.
Her mind had to pause, even if briefly, before launching into its usual overclocked routines.
She began tweaking tiny things. Not life-changing things. Just micro-adjustments. She unplugged her earphones during walks and let the world make noise. She resisted the urge to check messages instantly. She watched the sky instead of her screen while waiting for the bus. She picked the second option on the menu just to feel what it was like to not over-analyse a sandwich.
Real life complexity doesn’t fade just because you slow down.
Her stressors were still there. Her overthinking still had stamina. Her body still reacted faster than her logic. But the edges softened enough for her to notice something she had overlooked for years: her mind wasn’t attacking her. It was trying to shield her from a world it falsely believed was sharper than it really was.
She hadn’t been fragile. She had been vigilant.
And vigilance is heavy.
Weeks passed before she recognised the biggest shift. She didn’t avoid her old patterns — she understood them. The anticipation. The constant scanning. The mental rehearsal of conflicts that hadn’t happened. They weren’t flaws. They were outdated strategies. They had protected her once. They were suffocating her now.
Her pace changed because she stopped fighting her mind and started listening to it like an old friend who hadn’t realised the war was over.
If you asked her what she learned, she wouldn’t offer a tidy moral. She’d say something small, something lived-in, something both a teenager and an elder could nod at:
“Life doesn’t always reward speed. Sometimes it rewards the courage to go slow even when your mind begs you to run.”
And in that slowness, she found a rhythm she hadn’t felt in years —
not control, not certainty,
just a pace her body could finally survive.
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