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The fear under wanting to help people
I finished yoga teacher training. I never taught, outside a handful of private lessons – too afraid someone would get hurt trying to do what I showed them, that I’d be responsible for a body I didn’t fully understand. I’m circling the same fear now with this writing project. I don’t tell anyone what to do. I just say what happened to me and stop there. I’m still braced like it’s the yoga room. Still afraid of a kind of responsibility that was never actually mine.
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Something changed and I didn’t notice
I deleted Facebook but kept Messenger. I caught myself scrolling again by the end of the day. Everything in my feed is strangers I never followed, ads dressed as content, people selling something. I thought I was catching up with friends, being present, being relational. I wasn’t weak, I failed to notice when the room changed. It used to be a place to catch up with people I knew. Now it’s a place where selling wears the appearance of connection.
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When emotions surface, I reach for my phone
Since I started morning pages, I catch my hand leaving the pen the moment something starts to surface. I reach for my phone before the feeling can finish arriving. I did this as a student too, needed a chat window open just to survive an essay. As soon as I pick it up, I’m sucked into doom-scrolling. Avoiding the feeling just gave me a fresh one to avoid. I haven’t found a real solution. I bought a device too boring to scroll – black and white, built for nothing but reading – and it draws a boundary I couldn’t hold on my own. The habit isn’t broken. It’s just been redirected somewhere I’ve agreed to call acceptable.
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Reading looks like a virtue instead of a vice
I’ve spent years reading other people’s conclusions instead of reaching my own, hunting for proof that my opinions aren’t good enough to trust. I tell myself one day I’ll have my own answers. I’ll be brave enough to stand up to scrutiny, brave enough to stand for something. For now, it’s easier to get lost in someone else’s opinions than to publish my own.
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Is that version yours?
My grandmother called me Miss America when we watched pageants together. It made me feel special. Then a contestant answered how she’d make the world better. Her response was beautiful and moving, exposing a seam of reality. I would never stand on stage and paint a vision like that. My grandmother wanted me to believe I could be anything. I don’t think she realized that she’d set a goal that I never asked for. I still don’t know who I want to become. Other people’s versions of me have crowded out my ability to know what that might have been.
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Wanting never settles
I keep selling things to buy new things, believing that enough money would finally end the cycle of tradeoffs. I thought accumulation would resolve the wanting. It doesn’t. It only changes what it’s asking for.
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I set the bar and keep moving it
Better systems, the right structure, everything in its place – first. I tell myself that’s responsibility. It’s a door I locked, then mistake being locked out for failure.
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The cost of knowing
I make choices that no one understands, and I can’t explain. The logic doesn’t hold up. The evidence says otherwise. There’s an insistence underneath that doesn’t care. I used to give in to the louder voices. It took decades of wondering why I kept creating outcomes I never intended before I learned to trust the insistence.
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A hidden contract
I made a whole practice out of trying to help people see what I could see. When they didn’t change, I tried harder. I called it generosity. I gifted insight, unaware of the quiet exchange underneath: to be seen and appreciated. It was how I learned to belong.
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I make myself earn it first
I’ve never cleaned out a closet on a day I wasn’t already wanting. I don’t just say I want – I must justify it first. I turn wanting into a problem to solve rather than just a thing to feel.