The past week felt like someone had turned up the volume on my inner world while the outer one kept moving at its usual pace. I wasn’t falling apart. I wasn’t drowning. I was simply tired in a way that didn’t match the day I had lived. The kind of tired that comes from carrying too many unspoken things in too small a space.
It showed up quietly.
A morning that started later than planned.
A routine that slipped because my mind had been running all night.
A body that refused to move the way I wanted it to.
Nothing dramatic, but deeply inconvenient when you’re trying to build a life that actually works.
At first, I did what I always do: labelled it as inconsistency. A lack of discipline. Another sign that I was falling behind while everyone else seemed to be building something important. But when the same heaviness returned the next day, and the next, the explanation didn’t fit anymore. There was more happening inside me than a set of missed habits.
The real shift began when I noticed how much my mind fills in the blanks whenever something feels uncertain. A single moment of emotional discomfort would grow into a full internal storyline before I even realised I had left the present. It reminded me of how, as a child, I created elaborate worlds in my imagination to escape tension at home. That skill protected me then, and it still kicks in whenever life feels too heavy to hold directly.
It was eye-opening to see the pattern with adult clarity.
My brain was trying to comfort me, but the comfort came at a cost.
Every story added weight I didn’t need to carry.
Once that clicked, everything else made sense.
It wasn’t that I lacked motivation or discipline.
I simply didn’t have spare emotional bandwidth.
My energy was being spent managing invisible alarms.
So I tried something small.
Each time my thoughts started running, I paused long enough to sort them into three buckets: the actual event, the meaning I was attaching to it, and what I was feeling underneath. It sounds unremarkable, but it created space where I previously had none. The moment I separated the fact from the story, the intensity dropped. Not dramatically. Not instantly. Just enough for me to feel like I wasn’t being pulled by a current I couldn’t see.
That tiny shift softened something in me.
I stopped treating every reaction as a personal flaw.
I stopped assuming discomfort meant disaster.
I stopped punishing myself for being human in moments that needed patience instead of perfection.
And as the noise inside me eased, even slightly, the mornings began to feel less impossible. I wasn’t magically energetic, but I wasn’t dreading the day either. There was steadiness where panic used to be. Clarity where guilt used to sit.
What surprised me most was how simple the lesson turned out to be.
My body had been communicating all along.
The exhaustion wasn’t failure.
The spirals weren’t proof of weakness.
They were signals.
And when I finally slowed down enough to listen, the shape of my life became clearer than it had been in a long time.
I didn’t need to become someone new or invent a different life.
I needed to understand myself without attacking the parts that were already trying to help me survive.
That’s the real work.
Not reinvention.
Not perfection.
Just choosing, again and again, to hear myself before I drown myself out.
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