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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 Someone’s withdrawn and you are trying to bring them back out.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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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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