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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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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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