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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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Always Either Doing Too Much or Not Enough

You do something and it’s too much. You do less of it and now you’re not doing enough. You can’t find the middle ground because the middle ground doesn’t exist, or it exists for you but it doesn’t exist for the people around you who all want something different. One person thinks you are overwhelming them. Another person thinks you have abandoned them. You can’t be present enough for one without being too present for the other. So you choose which person to disappoint and disappoint them. You are being judged by people who want contradictory things. Your responsibility is to be a person but the people want you to be different people depending on who’s looking at you. You can’t split yourself into different versions even though that’s what’s being asked. The feedback is constant. You are too much, not enough, in between, or you are wrong. The feedback changes depending on who’s talking and when they are talking so you never know if what you’re doing is right because right is conte...
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When Everything You Do Seems to Disappoint Someone

You make a choice and someone is upset about it. You don’t make a choice and someone is upset about that. You do something and it’s wrong. You don’t do something and that’s wrong too. The disappointment comes no matter what so at some point you stop trying to avoid it. People had an idea of who you would be and you turned out to be someone else. The difference between the two is the source of constant disappointment. They keep treating you like the person they imagined while you keep being the person you actually are. The two things don’t match so someone is always disappointed. Your success disappoints them or your struggles do. Your choices disappoint them or your lack of choices does. Your life disappoints them in whatever form it takes. You can’t do anything that feels right to you without disappointing someone who cares about you. You try changing to fit what they want and it works for a while. Then you get tired of being someone else and you go back to being yourself and th...
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Clueless on Whether Your Problems Are Bad Enough to Ask For Help

The struggle is real but it doesn’t look serious enough to deserve attention. You are managing everything that needs managing. You are showing up. So asking for help feels wrong even though the need for help is also real. Both things are happening at the same time. Other people have bigger problems. That’s just true. So your problems feel smaller and therefore less worthy of taking up space. Telling someone you are struggling feels like complaining about nothing compared to what they’re dealing with. The comparison makes asking for help feel dishonest. The measuring stick for problems is broken. You don’t know if what you are experiencing is legitimate or if you are overreacting to normal life. Other people have names for what’s wrong with them. You just have a feeling that things are too hard but you can’t explain why they’re too hard when you are not dealing with anything objectively difficult. Reaching out to anyone feels premature. They would probably give advice that doesn’t...
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Living With Everyone’s Wrong Version of You

The version of you that exists in other people’s minds is not you. You know this. They don’t. They’re confident that they know who you are and they’re completely wrong but their confidence makes them stick with their version. Correcting them doesn’t work. You tell them they’re wrong and they think you’re being modest or difficult or defensive. The correction gets absorbed back into the version so the version stays intact. You can’t fight the version because fighting it just reinforces it. The version has been built over time from limited information and first impressions and stories people told about you. The version is simpler than you are and more convenient for people to deal with. The real you is complicated and the version is not. People prefer the version. Your energy for correcting goes away after a while. It’s exhausting to be seen wrong and then have to correct it and have the correction be ignored. Eventually you stop correcting and just let the version exist without yo...
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Realizing You Have Been Chasing the Wrong Thing

Years went into pursuing something and the realization lands that the something was never actually wanted. The work was real and the goal was clear but the desire to reach the goal was borrowed from somewhere else. Now the thing is almost possible and it doesn’t matter. The immediate problem is that stopping feels like wasting the work already done. All that time and effort would mean nothing if the goal doesn’t get reached, but reaching the goal means getting something that doesn’t matter. Both options feel like loss. What complicates this is that people are invested in the goal. They helped support it, believed in it, and maybe sacrificed for it. Admitting that the whole thing was built on false wanting means admitting that their investment was in a false direction. That creates guilt alongside the panic about wasted time. The work that’s been done isn’t completely wasted even if the goal doesn’t matter. Some skills got built, some connections got made, and some growth happened...
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Not Sure Whether You Actually Changed or Just Convinced Yourself You Have

The pattern breaks once and it gets treated like the pattern is gone. One time of handling something differently becomes evidence of being someone different. The narrative gets built quickly and feels true immediately. Whether it’s actually true is a different question entirely. Looking back at all the times someone said they changed and believed it reveals something uncomfortable. The conviction felt real, the change felt complete, and the person felt different in every way. Then the same situation came back around and the exact same response happened again. All that change vanished like it never existed. This makes new attempts to change feel suspect from the beginning. Maybe this one will stick and maybe it won’t, or maybe the person is actually different and maybe they are just telling themselves a story that feels better than the old story. The uncertainty sits underneath the attempt without making the attempt impossible. The changes that feel most dramatic might be the leas...
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That Numb Feeling That Might Be Depression or Might Just Be Life

Everything is fine and also nothing is fine and somehow both of these things are true at the same time. The life that exists is the life that was supposed to be wanted and it’s here and the feeling about it is completely absent. Whether that’s clinical or whether that’s just accuracy is unknowable. Waking up and going through the day and going to bed happens the same way it happened yesterday and will happen tomorrow. The routine is established and working and the person inside it is completely disconnected from it. Everything gets done without any enthusiasm or resistance, just the steady motion of time passing while someone watches it pass. Other people seem to feel things about their lives and that seems normal and fine and some people also seem to feel nothing and that seems normal too. It’s unclear which version is the default and which version is broken. Maybe everyone feels nothing and just talks about it differently. Maybe everyone feels everything and this person just has ...
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