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Competence Becomes a Prison

You are the person who handles things, figures it out, and the person people call when they don’t know what to do. Being competent felt like freedom once but now it feels like a job you can’t quit. Other people have given you the role of person who has it together and you have been in that role long enough that you don’t know how to step out of it. They need you to be capable, to have answers, and to handle the things that scare them. What happens when you actually don’t know? Or what happens when you are scared too? The competence doesn’t allow for that. The competence requires you to be solid when everyone else is falling apart. The competence requires you to have answers even when there are no good answers. You have gotten very good at hiding the parts of yourself that aren’t competent. The confusion gets hidden. The uncertainty gets hidden. The fear gets hidden. What’s visible is the capable version and that’s the version that people know and rely on. The other version gets s...
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Vulnerability Does Not Come With a Guarantee

You open up to someone and there is no guarantee they are going to reciprocate. There is no guarantee they are going to understand. There’s no guarantee they are going to hold what you have shared with care. You have given them access to parts of yourself and there’s absolutely no way to protect yourself if they use that access to hurt you. This is the actual cost of vulnerability that nobody wants to talk about. The cost is the risk that you might be seen and rejected. That you might be known and dismissed. That you might open up and have your openness used against you. So you don’t open up. You keep it safe by keeping it hidden, maintain distance by maintaining mystery, protect yourself by protecting information about yourself, and you stay isolated and lonely but at least you are not at risk of being hurt. The people who are good at connection somehow tolerate this risk. They open up knowing there’s no guarantee. They show up vulnerable knowing someone might take advantage of ...
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Being Understood Makes You Want to Run

Someone gets it. They understand what you have been trying to explain for so long, see the pattern you have been avoiding, know what you need before you have to ask, and your first instinct is to leave. Being understood should feel like you have been rescued. Someone finally gets it, someone finally sees what’s been true all along, but instead of relief, there’s panic. The panic that comes from being known, or from having someone understand you so completely that they could hurt you with that knowledge if they wanted to. As long as nobody really gets you, you are safe. Their not understanding is protection. But this person understands and now you are vulnerable in ways you weren’t before. They could predict what you are feeling, know when you are lying, and see through the defenses that have been keeping you separate and protected. You want to be understood so badly but you also want to stay safe and those two things are in direct conflict. Understanding requires vulnerability, l...
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Can’t Stop Wanting Something You Think You Should Be Over

You thought you had moved past this by now. You thought you had gotten over it or healed from it or accepted that you can’t have it. Then you want it again and the disappointment is huge because you feel like you are back where you started. All the progress you thought you made evaporates and suddenly you are right back in the wanting. The wanting keeps coming back and each time it comes back you treat it like failure. You have failed at getting over it, failed at accepting what is, failed at moving on, or failed at being the kind of person who can want something and then let it go. The wanting keeps resurfacing like proof that none of your progress was real, but the wanting isn’t actually failure. The wanting is just there. It’s part of you. It comes and goes and sometimes it comes back stronger than before. That’s not a reflection on you or your growth. That’s just how wanting works. Wanting doesn’t follow a timeline. It doesn’t permanently disappear because you have decided it s...
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When All Your Energy Goes Into Making People Feel Better

Your day gets spent managing how other people feel. Someone’s irritable and you are trying to figure out what you did wrong. Someone’s withdrawn and you are trying to bring them back out. Someone’s in a bad mood and you are working on fixing it. Your energy is going to other people’s emotional states instead of your own life. The work of this is invisible but it’s constant. You are monitoring, adjusting, responding, managing. You are smaller when they need you to be smaller. You are quieter when they need peace. You are more energetic when they need cheering up. You are whatever they need because their comfort is the priority. This happens without conscious thought most of the time because you have been doing it for so long. This probably started because it was necessary. Maybe it was the only way to survive in your family or your relationships or your environment, or being attuned to other people’s feelings was the only way to stay safe, so you learned to do it really well. You be...
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Why You Do the Thing You Know You Shouldn’t Do

You know better and you do it anyway. This happens all the time and it never makes sense. The knowing is complete but it doesn’t stop anything. The advice is good. You know it’s good. You would give the same advice to someone else in the same situation. You can explain why the advice makes sense and why you should follow it. But knowing all of that doesn’t mean you are going to follow it. There’s a part of you that just doesn’t care what you know. That part wants what it wants regardless of what makes sense. That part is stronger than the knowing. That part is winning most of the time. You could call it self-sabotage or denial or just being stubborn. The name doesn’t really matter because naming it doesn’t change it. You still do the thing you know you shouldn’t do. You still ignore the voice in your head that knows better. Maybe that part of you knows something that the knowing part doesn’t know, maybe that part has a reason for doing what it’s doing, or maybe the thing you kn...
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Looking in the Mirror and Not Knowing Who You Are

You see yourself reflected back and it takes a second to recognize the face. The features are yours but the expression is someone else’s. The way you are holding yourself is different. The way you are looking at the world from behind those eyes is not the way you remember looking at it. When did that happen? When did you become someone you have to think about before you can recognize? There was a moment somewhere where you started being unfamiliar to yourself but you can’t quite pinpoint when it was. The person looking back has made different choices than the person you thought you were. They are quieter or louder or harder or softer in ways that don’t match the image you had of yourself. They move through the world differently, they react to things differently, and they want different things. It’s not like you woke up different. It’s more like you kept making small adjustments and one day you looked and realized you’d turned into someone new, someone who handles things the way t...
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Exhaustion of Always Saying Yes When You Mean No

The yes that comes out of your mouth doesn’t match the no that’s in your head and the disconnect is exhausting. You are spending the entire day doing things you agreed to do while hating that you agreed to them. Other people seem fine saying no. They do it easily like it’s not even a thing. They just say the word and move on. For you it feels like climbing a mountain. The word is somewhere inside but getting it out costs more than you have. So you say yes and you do the thing and you resent everyone involved including yourself. You resent the person who asked. You resent yourself for saying yes. You resent the time that got taken from you. The resentment is exhausting on top of doing the thing you didn’t want to do in the first place. The guilt sits underneath it all. Guilt that you are selfish for not wanting to do the thing. Guilt that you are ungrateful that someone asked you. Guilt that you are not a good person because good people say yes. The guilt makes saying yes feel obl...
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Your Growth Means Leaving People Behind

You are changing and the people around you aren’t and that creates distance that’s hard to talk about. They’re still who they always were and you are not who you were and now you don’t fit in the same ways you used to fit. The friendship that made sense is still there but it doesn’t feel like home anymore. The conversations are getting harder. You want to talk about things they don’t care about. You’ve moved on from things they’re still focused on. You are interested in stuff they think is pointless. The gap between what matters to you and what matters to them is growing and you don’t know how to close it. You are trying to bridge it and they’re not even looking for the bridge. It’s not their fault. It’s not your fault. People just grow differently and sometimes the growing takes them in different directions. Sometimes the friendship that made perfect sense at one point doesn’t make sense the same way anymore. You were both in the same place and now you are not and you can’t figure...
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You Don’t Have to Explain Yourself to Anyone

You have been explaining yourself for so long that not explaining feels weird. Every choice comes with a reason you need to give. Every decision comes with justification. Every action needs to be defended so people don’t think the wrong thing about you. Then you realize you don’t have to do that. You really don’t. Nobody actually needs your explanation. They just want it because they are curious or judgmental or they don’t get it. None of those reasons mean you owe them an explanation. The relief of just not explaining is huge. Someone asks why you did something and instead of launching into the whole story you just say you did it. That’s it. No justification. No reasoning. No attempt to make them understand. Just the fact that it happened. They might think you are being rude or defensive or hiding something. That’s what they’ll think when you stop explaining everything. They are used to you explaining so the stopping feels like a change in the relationship. Really it’s just you ...
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