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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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Things Get So Bad You Can Finally Stop Pretending

The facade cracks and instead of trying to fix it there’s just this sense of okay, finally we can be real about this. The thing that’s been bad for months or years is finally bad enough that hiding it isn’t worth the energy anymore. Giving up has a strange freedom to it. The trying to keep things together takes so much effort. The fighting to make things look okay when they’re not okay is exhausting in ways that don’t show on the outside. When you finally stop doing that, there’s this breath you get to take. The energy that was going into the performance gets to go somewhere else or nowhere at all. The performance stops being the priority. People know now. They know it’s not fine. They know you are not fine. The secret is out and keeping the secret was worse than people knowing. People knowing means you don’t have to carry it alone anymore. People knowing means you can finally ask for something instead of pretending you don’t need anything. The asking becomes possible because there...
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That One Thing You Did That Won’t Leave Your Head

The brain grabbed onto something and it won’t let go. It could be anything. A word that came out wrong. A choice that looked bad. A moment that was awkward. Whatever it is, it’s lodged in there and it keeps coming back. Days pass and it should fade but it doesn’t. The feeling about it stays fresh. The embarrassment stays real. The replaying keeps happening like maybe this time watching it again will make it make sense or make it hurt less. It doesn’t. During a normal moment it suddenly arrives. During work or lunch or a conversation with someone who has nothing to do with the original thing. The brain decides this is a good time to bring up the past. The feeling of wanting to disappear comes back even though you’re just sitting at a table doing nothing wrong. Other people don’t think about it. They genuinely forgot or they never cared in the first place. The only person still thinking about it is the person it happened to. The only person suffering from the memory is the person l...
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Doubting Every Decision After You Have Already Made It

The choice is made and now all you can think about is whether you chose wrong. The doubt didn’t exist before the commitment. Now it’s everywhere. Now every reason for the choice looks like a mistake. You could look back at why you picked it and that would probably help but you don’t. You just sit with the new doubt and let it grow. The doubt finds all the ways this could be wrong and ignores all the ways it could be right. The doubt is very good at its job. Other people seem fine with their choices. They picked something and they are just living with it without this constant questioning. Either they picked right or they are better at accepting that they might have picked wrong. Either way they are not drowning in this the way you are. The second-guessing eats up energy that would go toward making the choice work. Instead of investing in what you picked you are spending time imagining what you didn’t pick. The imagining feels productive like you are figuring something out but you ...
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Admitting You Need Something Sometimes Feels Like Failure

You need something and the first instinct is to hide it because it feels like it is shameful. The need and the shame about the need exists and they are tangled together so closely. It’s hard to separate them. Needing things makes you vulnerable. It makes you dependent on someone else caring enough to help. It makes you admit that you are not completely fine on your own. All of those things feel dangerous even when they are just human. Everyone needs things but needing things still feels like failure. The shame tells you that you should have figured this out already. You should be able to handle it without asking. You should be strong enough to not need help. You should be independent enough to not need support. The should is so loud that the actual need gets quieter and quieter until you almost don’t feel it anymore, and so you don’t ask. You handle it alone even it’s harder to handle it alone. You suffer through something that would be easier with help but you don’t get the help...
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Someone Shows You Exactly Who They Are

You are listening to them talk and something lands that didn’t land before. The words are the same as always but this time you hear what’s underneath them. You are seeing the actual person instead of the idea of them and the actual person is different. They do something selfish and you finally notice the pattern instead of excusing the incident. They say something cruel and you realize they say cruel things regularly, you just didn’t want to see it. The clarity arrives and it is not gentle. It is sharp and it hurts because now you know. The person has not changed. They have been this way the whole time. You built a version of them based on what you wanted them to be and that version has been protecting you from seeing the actual person. Now the protection is gone and you can see them exactly as they are. It’s strange because you still care about them but the caring feels different. You care for who they actually are instead of who you pretended they were. The actual version is sm...
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Feeling Like Nobody Special

You are just a regular person living a regular life and the ordinariness of it sits heavier than it should. Nothing about you is remarkable. Your talents are things lots of people have. Your struggles are struggles most people have. You’re reading the same books as everyone else and watching the same shows and wanting the same things. The life you are building is functional but not exceptional. You go to work and you come home and you do the things people do. You’re good at some things and bad at others like everyone is. You’re not particularly interesting and you’re not particularly broken. You’re just here. The fear underneath this is that ordinariness means you don’t matter. That if you’re not special then you’re not important and if you’re not important then your existence is something that could be removed and the world would keep spinning exactly the same. That thought is why ordinariness feels terrifying. But ordinariness is what most people are. The special people are the...
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Not Needing Approval to Do the Thing You are Already Supposed to Do

You know what needs to happen. That knowledge means you already have most of what you need. You are waiting for approval like the approval is separate from the knowing but it’s not. Knowing is approval. The fact that you know something needs to change means you already have the information you need to start changing it. The person whose approval you want doesn’t have it to give because this isn’t their life. It’s your life. The approval has to come from you and it already does if you listen to yourself long enough without second-guessing. The knowledge that something needs to happen is the approval. It’s the internal yes that you are looking for external confirmation of. You are stalling because starting is hard in ways that waiting isn’t. Starting requires commitment. Starting requires accepting that you might be wrong about what needs doing or right about what needs doing and it doesn’t work anyway. Starting requires doing the thing even though it might not fix anything. Waiting ...
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