There's a version of the past that lives in you like a book you've already finished but keep rereading, and the honest reason you keep returning has very little to do with the ending — which you already know — and everything to do with the fact that being inside the story feels safer than standing outside it with nothing to hold. Grief moves through you and releases. What most people are doing instead is maintenance — the daily, largely unconscious act of keeping a version of events alive, tending to it, making sure the details stay sharp …
Trying Again, Again
I wake up some mornings and my head's already running — could've slept earlier, could've finished that thing — and I haven't even moved yet, haven't opened my eyes all the way, and already I'm standing in my own courtroom with toothpaste foam everywhere, sentencing myself to being behind at 7:47 AM. Before coffee. Which feels like a design flaw, honestly, like whoever built humans forgot to add a buffer between waking up and the self-criticism startup sequence. What nobody tells you about fresh starts is they carry this weird compound …
The Quiet Rebellion : Trading More for Enough
There was a stretch of time where my life kept getting shinier on the outside and strangely thinner on the inside. The goals I’d chased for years started lining up: work made sense, money wasn’t a constant headache, weekends didn’t feel like recovery from collapse anymore. People said things like “You’re in a good place,” and I’d nod, because they weren’t wrong. At the same time, there was this low-level emptiness humming underneath everything that I couldn’t explain without sounding ungrateful. I tried to outrun it for a while. New targets, …
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When Love Starts to Cost You
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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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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