“Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.” ~Soren Kierkegaard

Let’s be clear:

This isn’t an article about positive thinking.

This isn’t an article about how silver linings make everything okay.

This isn’t an article about how your perspective on anxiety is all wrong.

The kids call those things “toxic positivity.”

No toxic positivity here.

This is an article about my lifelong relationship with anxiety and what I’ve learned from something that won’t go away. At times the anxiety spikes and feels almost crippling. I have a hard time appreciating the learning at those times, but it’s still there.

That is what this article is all about.

Please do not confuse me learning things from something that won’t go away with me endorsing that thing or saying it’s a good thing. I would trade everything I’ve learned from anxiety for less anxiety. I don’t even like writing about it because focusing on it this much gives me anxiety. But I want to write things that help people.

How a Bare Butt Sparked My Anxiety

Stranger Things has shown how cool the eighties were. For the most part, this is true. I miss arcades and the music. I miss the freedom I had as a kid that I don’t see kids having these days. I miss some of the fashion. I don’t miss people not knowing anything about mental health.

We used to play football every day after school at a baseball field/park in our little town. This was unsupervised tackle football with kids a lot older than me.

I remember one time a guy broke his finger. It was pointing back at him at a ninety-degree angle. He took off sprinting toward his house. One of the older kids said, “He’s running home to Mommy!” and we all went back to playing.

Oddly enough, possibly breaking my finger didn’t worry me. What did worry me was one day when a kid was running for a touchdown, and another kid dove to stop him. He only caught the top of his pants, pulling them down and exposing his bare butt. He made the touchdown anyway, but while everyone else thought it was hilarious, it scared me to death.

What if that happens to me?

I started tying my pants up with a string every day, pulling it tight enough to make my stomach hurt (remember, this was the eighties—I was wearing those neon-colored pajama-pant-looking things). I started to feel sick before we played football, before school, and before everything.

You would think it was obvious that I was dealing with anxiety, but you have to remember that in the eighties and nineties, we did not talk about mental health like we do now. We didn’t throw around terms like anxiety and depression. I was just the weird kid that threw up before he went to school.

The anxiety has gotten a little more noticeable over the past few years. It seems to have gotten worse since having COVID in 2020 and 2021. I don’t know if that’s a thing, but it feels like it is. It has forced me to deal with it mindfully and with more intention. It’s never pleasant, but I’ve learned a few things.

1. Anxiety has taught me to be present.

The crushing presence of high anxiety forces me to be exactly where I am at that moment. I’m not able to read or write. I cannot play a video game or watch a movie with any kind of enjoyment. There’s nothing I can do.

This roots me in the moment in a very intense, authentic way. That might seem bad since I’m anxious, but there’s another layer to it. When I can be completely present with the physiological sensations of anxiety, I recognize that they are energy in the body. When I’m super present, I can see how my mind is turning those sensations into the emotion we call anxiety, and that’s where my suffering comes from.

2. Anxiety has taught me about control.

I’ve been told that my hyper-independence and need to be prepared for anything is a trauma response. I was a therapist for ten years, and I still don’t know what to do with this information. I do know that anxiety gives me a crash course in what I can control and what I cannot control.

The bad news is that I can’t control any of the things that I think are creating anxiety. The good news is that I can control my response to all those things. Anxiety forces me to do this in a very intentional way.

Anxiety also puts my mind firmly on something bigger than myself. Maybe it’s that higher power we hear about in AA meetings and on award shows. It’s good for me to get outside my head and remember that I’m not in charge of anything. It’s helpful to only box within my weight class.

3. Anxiety teaches me to have good habits and boundaries.

I’m bad about allowing my habits and boundaries to slip when times are good. I start eating poorly, I stop exercising, I stay up too late, and I watch a bunch of shows and movies that beam darkness and distraction directly into my head.

I also start to allow unhealthy and even toxic people to have a more prominent role in my life. This is all under the guise of helping them because people reach out to me a lot. Over the years, I’ve learned I have to limit how close I let the most toxic people get to me, no matter how much help they need.

When I’m feeling good, I start thinking I can handle anything, and my boundaries slip. Anxiety is always a reminder that the unhealthiness in my life has consequences, and I clean house when it spikes.

4. Anxiety reminds me how important growth is.

Once I clean house, I start looking at new projects and things I can do to feel better. I start taking the next step in who I want to be. This has been difficult over the past three years because the waves of anxiety have been so intense, but I see the light at the end of the tunnel as the good habits I put in place and the new projects and things I started are beginning to come to fruition.

I chose to let my counseling license go inactive and focus on life coaching because it’s less stressful, and I’m better at it. This would not have happened without anxiety. I have changed my diet and exercise in response to blood pressure and anxiety, and these are good habits to have whether I am anxious or not.

5. Anxiety taught me to be gentle.

I’ve written and spoken a lot about my desire to be gentler with people. I’m not unkind, and I have a lot of compassion for people, but this is often expressed gruffly or too directly. It’s how I was raised, and I often feel like I am patronizing people if I walk in verbal circles when I’m trying to help them with something.

When I’m experiencing high anxiety I feel fragile, which helps me understand how other people might feel in the face of my bluntness. I started working on being gentler around 2018, and I was disappointed in my progress.

It was also around that year that anxiety began to become a fixture in my life again. As I look back now, I can recognize that I am a lot gentler with everyone around me when I’m anxious. Being a little fragile helps me treat everybody else with a little more care.

6. Anxiety taught me to slow down and ask for help.

When I started experiencing increased anxiety, it led me to make quick decisions and change things to try to deal with it. This makes sense. Evolutionarily, anxiety is meant to prompt us to action.

The problem was that these decisions rarely turned out to be my best ones and often led to other consequences I had to deal with down the line. Because of this, I’ve learned that an anxiety spike is not the time to make big decisions.

If I have to make a decision about something, I slow down and try to be very intentional about it. I’ve also learned I need to talk it out with somebody else, something I’ve never been inclined to do. Asking for help is a good thing.

7. Anxiety helps me speed up.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, this is the opposite of what I just said.

Let me clarify.

One of the most important quotes I’ve ever read came from the folk singer Joan Baez: “Action is the antidote to anxiety.” (Years later, I learned she might have said despair instead of anxiety, but I heard it the first way).

Some tasks bring anxiety that I do not want to deal with. These usually involve phone calls or emails to bureaucratic organizations or errands that I find unpleasant and anxiety-inducing (avoiding these also makes sense—our evolutionary legacy cannot understand why we would do something that may feel dangerous).

Over the years, I’ve learned that anxiety diminishes if I take the steps I need to take to address these tasks. The cool thing is that this has translated over to many of my day-to-day tasks.

By acting in the face of anxiety, I’ve gotten pretty good about doing things when they need to be done. I mow the lawn when it needs to be mowed, take out the trash when it needs to be taken out, put the laundry up when it needs to be put up, and get the oil changed in my truck when it needs to be changed.

Once we start addressing tasks immediately, it becomes a habit. Anxiety helped me do this.

Anxiety Still Sucks

So there you go. Seven things anxiety has taught me. I’m grateful for these lessons, but they don’t make anxiety any less difficult in the moment.

Anxiety is meant to suck. It’s meant to make things difficult and uncomfortable for us until we do something to address the problem. The problem, unfortunately, is often unaddressable these days.

We worry about things like losing our job, not having enough money, divorce, and the general state of the world. Anxiety did not develop to address any of these things, so sometimes being comfortable with discomfort is the best we can offer ourselves.

Maybe that’s the last thing anxiety is teaching me.

About James Scott Henson

James is a writer who wants to help people overcome challenges and make important changes in their lives. He has worked for over twenty years as a social worker, meditation teacher, and licensed professional counselor. Having found his home in life coaching, he helps others achieve their goals and create the life they want. As a writer, James shares helpful posts on Substack, writing thousands of words each month to inspire, challenge, and motivate his subscribers.

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Life is never constant. And it can be difficult to remain balanced in the midst of change. Susan Bauer-Wu shares a guided meditation to ground us in the present moment and cultivate equanimity.

With equanimity, we can feel the possibility of balance in our hearts in the midst of life’s ups and downs. It’s a quality that’s both receptive and stable. In short, it’s the opposite of the reactive mind. With equanimity, there’s a feeling of ease and allowing as we ride the waves of change and different experiences. It allows us to be present to suffering and present to joy. It combines an understanding mind together with a compassionate heart. It doesn’t mean we are indifferent or that we don’t care or that we care less, it means we allow life to unfold without any attachments to an outcome or taking things personally. And finally, equanimity is opening to easing into each moment with care and gentleness. 

A Meditation to Create Inner Balance in the Face of Change

Read and practice the guided meditation script below, pausing after each paragraph. Or listen to the audio practice.

1. Settle into a comfortable posture. You can close your eyes or simply lower your gaze. Bring awareness toward your body. Notice your breath move through your body, feeling the chest or belly expand with your breath.
2. Take a moment to set an intention for the practice. Perhaps it’s to feel a sense of inner balance and ease. Take in the following phrases or the meaning of the phrases and quietly repeat to yourself: Things are just as they are. I’m safe in this moment. My happiness and suffering depend on my thoughts and actions, not simply upon my wishes. May I feel joy and ease.
3. Notice whatever is present for you right now. Resting in a feeling of OK-ness in this moment, just as it is.
4. Bring to mind someone who you care about and who may be going through a hard time. Extend these phrases or the meaning of the phrases to this person. I care for you yet cannot keep you from suffering. I love you yet cannot control your happiness. Your happiness and suffering depend on your thoughts and actions and not my wishes for you. May you feel joy and ease.
5. Notice how you feel. Notice the raw feeling of whatever is present for you. Sit with it. Just letting it be, right now.
6. Once again, bring awareness to the body, and the breath. Feel the ease of simply being and breathing. 

Interested in Meditation? Here Are the Basics 

Meditation is a core mindfulness practice that you can customize to meet you where you are, bring your attention to the present moment, and engage in more compassion and connection. Here’s what you need to know to get started. Read More 

• Eric Langshur and Nate Klemp
• May 21, 2021

“I will not teach or love or show you anything perfectly, but I will let you see me, and I will always hold sacred the gift of seeing you—truly, deeply, seeing you.” ~Brené Brown

The first time my kids saw me truly cry was Christmas of 2021. My oldest was sixteen, and my youngest was twelve.

They had just opened their presents. It should have been a warm, joyful morning. Instead, I turned away toward the foyer near the entry of the house, my back to them, as tears threatened to spill over. My mom—whose emotional chaos had disrupted a large part of my life—was in a psychiatric hospital again. Her mental health had unraveled once more, and the grief of it all, the repetition, the helplessness, finally caught up with me.

I had spent years trying to keep my pain out of sight. I thought I could hide it again. But this time, I couldn’t.

Both of my children asked, “Are you okay?”

I whispered, “I’m fine,” even as the tears streamed down.

Then something unexpected happened. They both came toward me and wrapped me in a hug. No fear. No confusion. Just love. Pure and steady.

That moment began to unravel something in me. What met me was tenderness. My children were not overwhelmed by my sadness. They simply responded to it. In that moment, something old began to crack: the belief that my pain was dangerous to the people I loved most.

I had spent so long trying not to become like my mom. I always felt responsible for her feelings and well-being, and I never wanted my own children to feel burdened the way I had. But in trying so hard not to repeat the past, I held my emotional interior very guarded when I was sad.

I thought I was protecting them.

What I didn’t understand then was that my children did not need protection from my humanity. They needed some connection to it.

In late 2023, my younger child made an observation that showed me my hiding wasn’t really working.

“You’re the sad one,” he said, “and Dad is the mad one.”

The truth stung, but I knew he wasn’t being cruel. He was simply saying what he saw.

And he wasn’t wrong.

After that Christmas, I had gone back to holding everything in and trying not to let too much of my sadness show. But even without tears, my son had still been seeing my sadness for years—through what was happening with my mom, through losses I had carried quietly, through burdens I thought I was keeping to myself.

Of course he sensed it. Maybe it was in my demeanor or my energy, in the heaviness on my face, in the way I sometimes stared off blankly, or in the moments when he had to call my name several times before I came back. He often asked, “Are you okay, Mommy?” He knew something was there.

That was the moment I realized there was no point in hiding my inner world if my children could already feel it without words.

Kids are incredibly intuitive. Even when they don’t have the language, they can feel what is happening. They pick up on tension, sadness, distance, and strain long before anyone explains it. When we pretend everything is fine, they still feel that something is off.

What I began to understand is that without context, they were left to make meaning out of what they felt. They could assume my sadness had something to do with them, or that it was something they needed to fix.

But when I began giving them enough truth—without trauma dumping, without making them carry what was mine—they were better able not to personalize what they were sensing. They could understand that I had feelings, that those feelings were real and human, and that those feelings were not their fault.

I also began to see something else more clearly: my children had always seen me as strong, independent, and capable, the one who managed things and handled what needed to be handled. Because I did not let them see what I perceived as weak, I never really gave them the chance to know this too: I have feelings. My feelings matter too. Not just theirs.

As I began sharing more of my interior world in age-appropriate ways, my children became more thoughtful and considerate. Not because they were responsible for me, but because they could understand me more fully.

What hit me hardest was realizing that the very thing I had felt as a child—being unseen—was something I was repeating with my own kids without even knowing it. Not in the same form, but in a similar emotional pattern.

How could they really see me if I never let them know anything about what was happening inside me? How could we have true connection if I only let them relate to my strength, competence, and composure while hiding the deeper parts of my inner world?

By 2026, something had begun to change, but not quickly and not by accident. It came after years of therapy, reflection, and slowly learning how often I still suppressed what I felt—pushing it down, swallowing hard, going into my bedroom to hide it, trying to regain composure before anyone saw. Little by little, I stopped doing that as much. I cried more freely. I let more be seen.

My youngest son, who is autistic and deeply bonded to me, at first didn’t know what to do when I began letting my tears show more often. A few months ago, while I was crying, he said, “I want to make you feel better, but I don’t know how.”

I told him, “You don’t have to fix anything. Just let me be me, and I’ll let you be you. That’s the best gift we can give each other.”

After that, I sensed his awkwardness begin to soften into acceptance.

A little later, as we were landing in Houston after a trip to Canada, tears started falling again. I didn’t want to come back. That place no longer feels like home to me. Without saying a word, my son wrapped his arms around me and held me while I cried.

After a few minutes, I exhaled and said, “Thank you. I feel better now.”

But it was the moment in the car that stayed with me most.

About a month later, I was crying again while we were driving. A song came on the radio that reminded me of someone I missed, and the sadness rose up fast. He was sitting next to me, and I said, “I’m okay, honey. The song just reminds me of someone and makes me sad. I just need to get it out, and then I’ll be okay.”

Even then, I still felt self-conscious. Some part of me still worried he might be judging me.

Instead, he said something that completely stunned me.

“I wish I could cry like that,” he said. “You’re strong.”

I laughed a little and said, “I get it, honey. We’ll get you crying again eventually.”

I meant it tenderly, but I also realized in that moment that he had learned some of the same lessons so many boys learn early—that tears get pushed down, that feelings get stuck, that crying becomes something to resist. And I knew he had learned some of that from what both his dad and I had modeled. It would take time to unlearn.

That moment stayed with me because it showed me how differently he was seeing my tears than I had always seen them myself.

For so much of my life, I had equated crying with weakness. I thought being strong meant holding everything in, staying composed, pushing through, and keeping the hard parts hidden. But through my son’s eyes, I saw something different. He did not see my tears as failure. He saw courage in them.

That moment opened up another conversation between us. He told me he could not cry anymore. He said it always felt stuck in his throat. He could feel it, but it would not come out. He told me the last time he had really cried was when he was thirteen.

I thought then about how much energy so many of us spend trying not to feel what is already there.

For years, I thought being a good parent meant being unshakable. I thought strength meant keeping my children from seeing my grief, my overwhelm, my tenderness, and my breaking points.

Now I think children need honesty more than performance. They need to know that hard feelings can be felt without becoming dangerous, that sadness can move through a room without becoming their responsibility, and that love does not disappear when life gets hard.

I used to think my tears would make my children feel less safe.

What I know now is that when those tears are held with honesty and care, they can teach something powerful: that being fully human is not weakness, and connection often deepens the moment we stop pretending we have nothing to feel.

About Allison Briggs

Allison Jeanette Briggs is a therapist, writer, and speaker specializing in helping women heal from codependency, childhood trauma, and emotional neglect. She blends psychological insight with spiritual depth to guide clients and readers toward self-trust, boundaries, and authentic connection. Allison is the author of the upcoming memoir On Being Real: Healing the Codependent Heart of a Woman and shares reflections on healing, resilience, and inner freedom at on-being-real.com.

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“She remembered who she was, and the game changed.” ~Lalah Delia

The scale. Those dreaded words and those dreaded numbers. It can strike fear in the heart of any generally happy human. We look at guidelines and BMI charts and always think, “It should be lower.”

Have you ever been having a perfectly good day and suddenly think, “Maybe I should weigh myself?” And just like that, your day is ruined.

How do we let a $20 bathroom scale dictate how we feel about ourselves?

I remember stepping on the scale and seeing numbers that somehow determined how I valued myself. What a ridiculous way to measure our worth. Yet so many of us do it. Somewhere along the way we start believing that if we weigh less, we somehow are more.

I grew up in the 1990s, and I remember being told that I should weigh 120 pounds. Thank you, Seventeen Magazine and the fashion industry. Granted, I’m not tall. But that number became something I chased for years. I weighed myself religiously every day. I didn’t care if I had energy or if I felt good. What mattered was the number on the scale. If I could just reach that elusive number, all would be right with the world.

All around me, the message was the same: do more, eat less, weigh less. If I could just reach that number, somehow, I would become the most worthy version of myself.

People would complement the weight loss, not realizing that I was often starving and exhausted. I felt terrible, but the number on the scale was good. It never made sense.

Around that time, I had taken up running after the loss of my grandmother. The endorphins gave me a positive way to deal with grief. Running helped me process the pain. But then, as good things often do, it became something negative.

I also realized something else—it made me smaller.

For whatever reason, that made me feel better about myself. So for many years, I learned that if I ran enough and ate little enough, I could stay small. I remember being told in my early twenties that my body fat was too low. At the time, I wore that like a badge of honor. Looking back now, it seems a little ridiculous.

Life, of course, has a way of changing things. After four pregnancies, the number on the scale became harder to control. Each time my weight crept up, I would return to running to try to bring the number back down. After each pregnancy it became harder.

Even when I added strength training, it wasn’t about building strength. It was about burning more calories. Everything revolved around pleasing the number on the scale. If I had to do jumping jacks in between every exercise to burn more calories, I did it. I never considered if I was getting stronger. To be honest, it didn’t matter.

Then something unexpected happened.

After a fall from my horse injured my ankle—and my pride—I wasn’t able to run the way I used to. Instead, I started strength training from a different place. I wasn’t training to burn calories. I was training to be strong. If I couldn’t run, I still needed to be able to move well.

I wanted to lift things. Move things. Feel capable in my body.

And then something strange started happening. People began telling me I looked like I had lost weight.

But when I stepped on the scale, the number hadn’t gone down. In fact, it had gone up.

I remember thinking, “That’s odd… my scale says this, but my old jeans fit again.”

Slowly, it dawned on me.

Maybe the scale wasn’t telling the whole story.

For years I believed the scale told the truth about my health. What I eventually realized is that it was only telling me how much gravity was pulling on my body that morning. It couldn’t measure strength. It couldn’t measure muscle. It couldn’t measure how capable my body had become.

As a nurse practitioner, I do still weigh patients in my clinical practice. Weight trends can matter in certain situations, and sometimes it helps guide medical decisions. It can impact your health, and my job is to make you healthier.

But that number was never meant to determine whether someone should have a good day.

It doesn’t measure resilience.

It doesn’t measure energy.

It doesn’t measure confidence or strength.

What frustrates me most is realizing that the same narrative I grew up with is still alive and well. I see it in my adolescent patients. I see it in the media my children are exposed to.

Boys are often encouraged to become stronger and more capable. A higher number on the scale is even to be celebrated if it means they are building muscle.

Girls often hear a different message. Smaller is better. I work daily to change that narrative. I want my daughters and all girls to know that stronger is better.

I try to remind them of something I wish I had understood earlier: our bodies are meant to be strong, healthy, and capable. Strength is something we build, not something we shrink ourselves into.

I remember when that little bathroom scale could determine what kind of day I was going to have. The number could jump up five pounds overnight from hormones or water retention, even if I had done everything “right” the day before.

Now I see it differently.

If I’m going to focus on a number, I’d rather focus on the amount of weight I can lift.

The number on my deadlift. The number on my squat. The number on my bench press.

Those numbers tell a much more meaningful story. They represent effort, consistency, and progress that actually reflect the work being done.

And maybe the day we stop letting the scale decide our worth is the day we finally start appreciating what our bodies are truly capable of. I think it’s time.

About Shannon McDonald

Shannon McDonald is a Nurse Practitioner and holistic nutrition coach who helps midlife women restore energy and build strength through her “Strong + Steady” methodology. With over 20 years of nursing experience, she guides women to work with their bodies through protein optimization and progressive strength training rather than restrictive dieting. Shannon integrates clinical expertise with faith-based wellness principles from her Nebraska homestead, where she trades scrubs for muck boots between working and client sessions. Visit her at navigatingtowellness.com.

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“The privilege of a lifetime is to become who you truly are.” ~Carl Jung

Where did I want to go out to eat?

The question was straightforward, and the answer should have been easy. But as my mind flipped through the options, my thoughts weren’t focused on what I wanted. Instead, I was preoccupied with making the right choice, the one least likely to cause tension.

Yes, my partner had asked where I wanted to go. But over time, I learned that answering honestly often came with consequences. My choice might be questioned, dismissed, or turned into a debate. If I tried to stand my ground, I spent the rest of the evening on edge—hyper-aware of the service, the food, the noise, and even the temperature—waiting for something to go wrong.

More often than not, I avoided deciding altogether. Ironically, my indecision led to being told I was boring or had no opinion at all.

I hadn’t always been this way. Up to my early twenties, I was known as feisty and opinionated. I knew what I wanted and went after it with quiet determination. In fact, it was this confidence and strength that initially drew my partner to me when we met during freshman orientation in college and, not long into our marriage, became a source of tension.

Over time, frequent arguments, distorted facts, and the constant questioning of my judgment chipped away at my confidence. I became anxious and second-guessed myself constantly.

Keeping the peace in our household became my primary focus, and I went to great lengths to ensure that my partner’s needs were met.

With my awareness focused outward, I slowly lost touch with my inner guidance. My survival instincts kicked into high gear, and I became the quintessential people-pleaser.

This way of being spilled into my professional life. I believed everyone was smarter, more capable, and better skilled than I was. Whether setting a strategy or executing a project, I overthought every action, wavered on each decision, and deferred to the person with the most authority.

In my personal life, my relationships became one-sided. Convinced I was rigid, quiet, and generally uninteresting, I slipped into the role of the easy, low-maintenance friend. I believed that if I expressed disagreement or had strong preferences, the relationship would fall apart.

Eventually, I extracted myself from my partner and moved back to my hometown. It was through reuniting with old friends that I clearly saw the person I had become. Having known me before my descent into survival mode, they were surprised by what they saw—my hesitation, my lack of opinions, the way I seemed to shrink from simple preferences.

Through their eyes, I remembered the person I used to be. And I recognized how far I had drifted from myself. Though painful, that realization gave me hope. If I had learned to constantly ask myself, “What will keep the peace?” perhaps I could learn to ask myself a different question instead: “What feels true for me right now?”

If you are feeling a dawning realization that the person you are now feels smaller than the person you once were, know this is not because you’re weak. It is because somewhere along the way, you learned that shrinking felt safer than standing firm. And if you are wondering what life could be like if you began to notice your preferences and voiced your opinion, read on.

Rebuilding Self-Trust

Use your body as a barometer. 

Asking yourself, “What feels true for me right now?” is a powerful question. However, I found myself so out of touch with my wants, needs, and desires that the answer often dissolved into a whirlpool of options and consequences.

In an effort to move beyond my confused mind, I turned my attention to my body. A tightness in my chest often meant I was about to agree to something that didn’t feel right. A wave of nausea signaled an emotional response that wasn’t aligned with my true feelings.

By practicing tuning into your body, you can begin to pause long enough to notice these physical signals. And they will become a quiet guide, helping you interrupt the automatic urge to override yourself.

Start with low-stakes decisions. 

With time and practice, I began using the physical sensations as guides to what I wanted. I was surprised to discover that I still had desires, needs, and opinions. They hadn’t disappeared—they had simply been buried.

But getting re-acquainted with myself was one thing. Using my voice to express what I discovered was another. Speaking up didn’t feel natural. It didn’t feel safe.

So I started slowly. I identified the people in my life who would be least likely to push back or dismiss my preferences. I also made sure I didn’t overwhelm my budding decision-making ability by burdening it with anything too heavy.

I chose a friend I’d known for twenty-five years as a starting point. Reaching out with a dinner invitation, I included the phrase “I’m really in the mood for Italian.” As my truth rolled off my tongue, I had to resist adding the caveat “but whatever you prefer.“

During dinner I paid close attention to my body and the impulses that surfaced, including the urge to ensure that the evening went smoothly, as if the efficiency of the service, the quality of the food, and even my friend’s experience rested on my shoulders.

As you begin this process, you may notice how strong your habitual hypervigilance can be. The weight of trying not to make the “wrong” decision can feel paralyzing, and the impulse to pull back may be almost overwhelming. But with each small, honest choice, that intensity begins to soften. What once felt dangerous starts to feel possible.

Practice disappointing others without abandoning yourself.

As I expanded into my rediscovered self-awareness, inevitably conflict arose and cooperation was required. I was pleased to discover that I could compromise what I wanted to allow someone else’s needs to be met without losing myself. In fact, the act of cooperation felt light and giving, which created a stark contrast to the heavy feeling that accompanied decisions that went against my best interests.

But even with a cooperative mindset, there were times when asserting my needs disappointed others.

I had attended a close friend’s destination wedding. The weekend was full of fun and laughter, and I enjoyed myself immensely. However, by the time Sunday evening rolled around, I was socially exhausted.

The plan was to go to dinner, but the idea of sitting in a noisy restaurant and holding conversations was mentally and emotionally taxing for me. I shared my truth with my friend, who immediately supported my request not to go to dinner.

In an emboldened state, I communicated my needs to the group that had gathered, preparing to leave. Most greeted the news with neutral emotion, but one person did not like my position and attempted to bully me into changing my mind. I did my best to express myself, but she remained on the attack, fixed in a place of personal offense.

This moment was difficult but presented an opportunity for me to dive further into self-knowing and trust. In that moment, I realized something important: someone else’s disappointment does not mean I have done something wrong. The discomfort I felt wasn’t a sign that I should abandon myself. It was simply the unfamiliar sensation of choosing myself.

Rebuilding self-trust isn’t about bold declarations or grand reinventions. It’s about quiet check-ins, small pauses, deliberate decisions, and allowing yourself to move through others’ disappointments and remaining in your place of truth. Self-trust is rebuilt in ordinary moments and seemingly inconsequential decisions.

If you feel out of touch with your wants and desires, know that this part of you is not gone. It is waiting for you to tune back in. Each time you do, you return a little closer to yourself. And that is how you move from responding from a place of fear to a place of self-trust.

About Lynn Crocker

Lynn Crocker is passionate about helping people shift their inner dialogue and take charge of their thoughts to create a more purposeful, joyful, and fulfilling life—one thought at a time. If you’d like support carrying this mindset forward or guidance in cultivating steadier, more empowering inner dialogue, she invites you to schedule a free discovery call to see if mindset coaching is right for you. Learn more at lynncrockercoaching.com.

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“The most precious gift we can offer anyone is our attention.” ~Thich Nhat Hanh

Judy was three the first time I missed it. She had spent a solid ten minutes stacking every couch cushion on our living room floor in Vancouver, building what she clearly considered an Olympic-grade landing pad. She climbed up on the couch, stretched her arms out wide, and gave me that look. You know the one. The look kids give you right before they do something that makes your heart jump into your throat.

“Baba, watch!” she yelled.

My phone was in my hand. It was always in my hand. I was reading a Slack message or an email or maybe nothing at all, just the reflex of pulling down to refresh. I have no memory of what it was. Zero. Whatever it was dissolved completely about four minutes after I read it, because that’s what 90% of notifications actually are: things that feel urgent and then vanish.

“One sec, habibti,” I told her. My thumb kept scrolling.

She jumped. I heard cushions scatter across the hardwood floor. When I looked up, she was already gone, walking toward her room with a stuffed elephant dragging behind her by one ear.

I went right back to my phone.

That moment didn’t register as anything at the time. Kids jump off furniture, parents check their phones, nobody files it under “things I’ll regret.” But that was the beginning of a pattern I wouldn’t recognize for years, because the pattern was made of absence, and absences are nearly impossible to see while they’re forming.

Over the next two years, the requests kept coming. “Baba, look at this.” “Baba, come see.” “Baba, watch me.” Each one a little quieter than the last. Each one met by a version of me that was technically in the room but had his mind parked somewhere inside a 6.1-inch screen.

I ran engineering teams for a living. My entire professional identity was built around responsiveness, around keeping fourteen threads going simultaneously, around never letting a message sit unread for more than a few minutes. I was genuinely proud of how fast I could context switch. I thought it was a superpower. I carried that mentality through our front door every evening and never once questioned whether it belonged there.

What I didn’t know, what took me an embarrassingly long time to figure out, was that Judy had been keeping score.

There was this Saturday. She was about five. She’d set herself up at the kitchen table with markers and a big sheet of paper, and she was drawing while narrating the entire scene to me in that wild way kids narrate things. The purple dog lived on a rainbow, and his best friend was a cloud named Martin, and they were both invited to a birthday party on the moon, but the purple dog was nervous because he’d never been to space.

I was saying “wow” and “oh cool” and “then what happened” at what I thought were convincing intervals. My phone was under the table. I was reading a thread about a deployment that had gone sideways.

She stopped talking.

I didn’t register the silence immediately. Fifteen seconds went by, maybe twenty, before I noticed and looked up. She was watching me. Her face was completely neutral. Not upset, not hurt in any obvious way. Just watching me the way you watch someone when you’ve confirmed something you already suspected.

That’s the face I think about. That neutral, knowing face. Five years old and she had already done the math.

Children are paying attention even when, and especially when, you think they aren’t. They don’t need you to announce that your phone is more interesting than they are. They pick it up from the half-second pause before you respond. From the direction your eyes keep drifting. From the way you say “tell me more” while your thumb is still moving.

Sarah, my wife, was the one who made me see it.

Months later, Judy in bed, both of us sitting at the kitchen counter with our laptops open. Sarah said, “She doesn’t ask you to watch anymore.”

Four seconds of silence.

“Have you noticed that?”

I had not.

I sat with that for a while after she said it. I tried to trace it back. When was the last time Judy had grabbed my shirt and said, “Baba, watch”? I could not find the moment. It hadn’t ended. It had evaporated. The way a sound fades out and at some point it’s just gone and you can’t say exactly when it crossed the line from barely there to not there at all.

What I understood, sitting at that counter with my laptop still open and glowing in front of me, was that Judy hadn’t stopped wanting me to watch. She had stopped thinking I would.

That is a different thing entirely, and it is the worst thing I have ever felt.

I did not sleep well that night. I stared at the ceiling and ran through a kind of inventory that I did not enjoy. How many times per day did I pick up my phone? I started counting the next morning and lost track before lunch. I reached for it while the toothbrush was still in my mouth. While the kettle was heating. While walking from the car to the front door, a distance of maybe forty feet, because apparently forty feet of not looking at a screen was too many.

At red lights. During meals. In bed next to Sarah while she told me about her day. That one hit especially hard when I actually forced myself to see it.

I wasn’t hooked on any particular app. It was the checking itself. The constant pull toward somewhere else, someone else’s conversation, someone else’s emergency, someone else’s opinion about something I would forget within the hour.

My phone had turned into a door I walked through a hundred times a day, and every single time I walked through it, I left the person in front of me standing in an empty room.

What changed was not willpower. What changed first was that I let myself feel how much I had already lost.

I thought about all those mornings with Judy eating Cheerios at the counter and telling me about a dream she had and me staring at my phone. All those evenings on the couch where I was physically next to my daughter and mentally sorting through my email. Years of that. Actual years. You cannot retrieve those mornings. They happened once, and I was elsewhere for most of them, and that is permanent.

That’s the part about distraction that nobody warns you about clearly enough. It doesn’t just consume your time. It takes moments that existed once and will never exist again, and you don’t even realize they’ve been taken until much later, when the only thing left is the knowledge that they happened and you weren’t there for them.

Sarah and I had a series of long conversations about what we actually wanted our home to feel like. Not about screen time. We had tried screen time rules before. We’d downloaded tracking apps, set daily limits, made agreements that fell apart within a week because the structure was always about restriction, and restriction gets exhausting. This time we talked about what we were making room for. That was a different question and it led to different answers.

We started with small moves. Phones went into the kitchen drawer during dinner. Then during the hour before bedtime. Then for the first hour on Saturday mornings. We didn’t tell Judy we were cutting back on screens. We told her we were trying to be more here.

She noticed within days. Obviously.

Two weeks in, maybe three, she walked into the living room carrying a book. I was on the couch, no phone, just sitting there, which I realize makes me sound like some kind of relic from 2004, but that’s what it felt like, genuinely disorienting to just sit. She climbed up next to me,  dropped the book in my lap, and started reading out loud.

She didn’t ask if I was paying attention. She could see that I was.

That was the start. Not of a program or a system, but of something more like a set of family habits that we built together. We started taking morning walks and leaving our phones at home. At dinner we’d go around the table: “What was the best part of your day?” We put a list up on the fridge, one column for each of us, with whatever habits we were each working on. Judy held us to ours as much as we held her to hers.

And somewhere in there the question I was asking myself shifted. It went from “How do I spend less time on my phone?” to “What do I want to be present for?” Those questions sound similar, but they are not. The first one is about avoiding something. The second one is about choosing something. The second one actually worked.

Judy is twelve now. She is sharp and funny, and she has started learning to code, which makes me proud and also slightly terrified about what she’ll be able to do in five years. She doesn’t say “Baba, watch” the way she used to.

But she does something I like better.

She sits down next to me and shows me whatever she’s working on. A drawing. A program that won’t run because of a missing bracket. A video she thinks is the funniest thing ever created. And when she looks over to see my reaction, I’m looking back at her.

Not every time. I want to be honest about that. I have not transformed into some perfectly present person. My hand still goes to my pocket. I still feel the pull when I’m bored or stressed or standing in a line with nothing to do.

But I notice it now. I notice it and I choose. Sometimes I choose wrong. But the noticing is the thing. That’s what changed.

If you recognize any of this, if you are reading this with a tight feeling in your chest, I want to say one thing to you. You are not too late. I know it feels that way. I know the guilt is heavy because I carried it for years and it is heavy.

But the people we love give us more chances than we probably deserve. Kids especially. They will let you back in if you show up.

You do not have to rearrange your entire life before bed tonight. You just have to put your phone down the next time someone you love is talking to you, and look at them. Really look. Let whatever is buzzing in your pocket stay unread for sixty seconds.

Sixty seconds. Start there.

The moments you’re scared you already missed? New ones are forming right now. They’re in the next room, in the next conversation, in the next time someone you love glances over at you hoping you’ll already be looking back.

Be looking back.

About Sabry Ali

Sabry Ali is a dad and husband in Vancouver, Canada. After years in engineering leadership at Life360, Reddit, Microsoft, and Amazon, nearly missing his daughter’s childhood inspired him and his wife, Sarah, to co-found Habi (https://habi.app), a habit tracker and screen time app for families. He writes about presence, digital habits, and building meaningful routines at habi.app/insights (https://habi.app/insights/).

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“The wound is the place where the Light enters you.” ~Rumi

I watched my son get hit by his father, and something inside me finally broke open.

Not broke apart. Broke open. There’s a difference.

For years, I had absorbed the chaos. I had made myself smaller, quieter, more accommodating. I had convinced myself that if I could just love harder, be better, try more, something would change. But in that moment, watching my child suffer at the hands of the man who was supposed to protect him, I understood with absolute clarity that nothing I did would ever be enough to fix this. The only thing left to do was leave.

It took me three months to plan our escape. Three months of pretending everything was normal while quietly gathering documents, saving money in secret, and mapping out a future I could barely imagine. Three months of holding my breath and praying my children could hold on just a little longer. Then, I moved myself and my four kids to safety.

I wish I could tell you that was the hard part. I wish I could say that once we were physically free, the healing began and everything got easier. But the truth is, leaving was just the beginning. The real transformation, the part that would eventually turn my deepest wounds into wisdom, was still waiting for me on the other side.

What nobody tells you about escaping an abusive relationship is that sometimes your children don’t escape with you. Not emotionally, anyway. Sometimes they carry the trauma in ways you can’t predict or control. Sometimes they blame you for disrupting their world, even when that world was hurting them.

My oldest daughter decided to go back to live with her father. She was angry with me. Teenagers often are, but this felt different. This felt like a rejection of everything I had sacrificed to keep her safe.

I begged her for months to come home. I cried myself to sleep more nights than I can count. I questioned every decision I had ever made. Had I been wrong to leave? Had I destroyed my family for nothing? Was I the problem all along, the way he always said I was?

The grief was suffocating. I had fought so hard to protect my children, and now one of them had chosen the very thing I had tried to protect her from. And then something happened that I never expected. She came back.

Not because I convinced her. Not because I begged hard enough or said the right words. She came back because she finally experienced for herself exactly what I had been trying to shield her from. The reality I had tried to describe in a thousand different ways suddenly became her own lived truth.

When she returned, she was different. Stronger. More awake. She had learned something that my warnings could never teach her. Today, she’s one of the most resilient young women I know.

Her coming home taught me something profound. It showed me that it was okay to come home to myself too. For so long, I had abandoned my own needs, my own voice, my own worth. I had been so focused on saving everyone else that I forgot I also needed saving. Watching my daughter find her way back reminded me that I could find my way back too.

This is what I mean when I say wounds become wisdom. Not that suffering is good or that pain has some cosmic purpose that makes it worthwhile. But that the very experiences that break us can also be the experiences that show us who we really are. The places where we have been hurt most deeply often become the places where we have the most to offer. I learned this lesson again just this past year.

My son, now fifteen, decided he wanted to live with his father. History was repeating itself and every cell in my body wanted to scream, to fight, to do whatever it took to stop him from making the same mistake his sister had made. But because I had walked this road before, I knew something I didn’t know the first time around. I knew I couldn’t protect him from his own journey.

This time, things were harder. He began acting out. Drugs. Alcohol. Trouble with the law. Probation. Every phone call brought new heartbreak. Every update reminded me of all the ways I wish I could fix this for him.

But here’s what my wounds had already taught me. Sometimes the most loving thing we can do is give someone space to learn their own lessons. Sometimes our children have to touch the fire themselves before they believe it’s hot. And sometimes, the hardest part of loving someone is trusting that they will find their way, even when the path they’re taking terrifies us.

So I did something that once would have felt impossible. I let go. Not of loving him, not of believing in him, but of trying to control the outcome. Instead, I held the door open. I stayed present. I stayed steady. I trusted that the love I had poured into him all those years was still alive inside him, even if I couldn’t see it yet.

And then something happened I could never have forced. After sixty days in a treatment facility, during one of our visits, my son looked at me with tears in his eyes and said, “Mom, I see it now. I don’t ever want to go back to Dad’s house, and I don’t want to be anything like him.”

In that moment, I realized that the patience, trust, and love I had held onto when I felt most powerless had been working quietly beneath the surface all along.

His sister, who had once walked that same road herself, embraced him with a quiet understanding that only comes from lived experience. Their bond also deepened in that moment. Shared truth, shared healing, shared resolve.

And just like his sister before him, he found his way home. Not because I convinced him. Not because I fought harder or found the right words. He came home because he had walked far enough into his own experience to see clearly for himself. The truth had become his own. That’s the paradox of love and letting go. When we stop trying to control someone else’s path, we create the space for them to choose their own.

My son’s journey didn’t unfold the way I would have wished. It involved pain, consequences, and lessons learned the hard way. But it also revealed something powerful. The foundation we lay for our children—the years of love, safety, and truth—it doesn’t disappear when they leave. It stays with them. And when they’re ready, it calls them back home.

This is the alchemy of transformation. The pain we survive becomes the medicine we offer. The wisdom we gain from our hardest seasons becomes a lantern for others still walking in the dark. We do not heal despite our wounds. We heal through them.

If you’re in the middle of something that feels impossible right now, I want you to know that you are not alone. Whatever fire you’re walking through, whatever heartbreak is keeping you up at night, whatever impossible choice is sitting in front of you, please hear me when I say this. You are stronger than you know.

The wound you’re carrying right now may one day become the very thing that helps someone else survive. Your story, the messy and painful and imperfect truth of it, has power. Not someday when you have it all figured out. Not when you reach the other side and can tie it up with a neat bow. Right now, in the middle of it, your survival matters.

Here’s what I’ve learned about turning wounds into wisdom.

First, let yourself feel it.

Don’t rush past the pain to get to the lesson. Grief is not a problem to solve. It’s a process to honor. The only way out is through and trying to skip the hard parts only means you’ll have to circle back later.

Second, resist the urge to control what you cannot control.

This was the hardest lesson for me. I wanted so badly to protect my children from every consequence of their choices. But some lessons can only be learned firsthand. Our job is not to remove every obstacle from the path of the people we love. Our job is to be there when they stumble, ready to help them back up.

Third, come home to yourself.

So many of us spend our lives abandoning ourselves for others. We shrink, accommodate, disappear. We make everyone else’s needs more important than our own until we forget we even have needs. Healing requires us to turn back toward ourselves with the same compassion we so freely offer everyone else.

Fourth, trust the timing.

Your breakthrough will not look like anyone else’s. Your healing will not follow a predictable schedule. The wisdom that’s being forged in you right now may not reveal itself for months or even years. But it is coming. Every hard thing you survive is adding to a reservoir of strength you don’t even know you have yet.

Finally, let your story be medicine.

When you’re ready, and only when you’re ready, share what you have learned. Not from a place of having it all figured out, but from a place of honest, imperfect survival. The world doesn’t need more people who pretend they have never struggled. The world needs people who are willing to say, “This nearly destroyed me, and here’s how I survived.”

I still have hard days. I still worry about my children. I still carry scars from a marriage that tried to convince me I was worthless. But I also carry something else now. I carry the unshakable knowledge that I’m capable of walking through fire and coming out the other side. I carry the wisdom that came from my deepest wounds. I carry a story that might just help someone else believe they can survive too.

For years, I believed that loving my children meant fighting every battle for them. Now I understand something different. Love sometimes looks like holding the light on the porch and trusting that when they’re ready, they will see it and walk toward home.

The wound is where the light enters. Not because pain is good, but because pain cracks us open in ways that nothing else can. And in those cracks, if we’re brave enough to look, we find something unexpected. We find ourselves. We find our strength. We find the wisdom that was waiting for us all along.

You are not broken. You never were. You’re being refined.

About Rebecca Wells

Rebecca is a soul midwife, life coach and health counselor specializing in attachment theory and trauma-informed healing. She is the author of Refined by Love and six companion workbooks. A mother of four, she lives in Tennessee where she helps others transform their wounds into wisdom. Connect with her at wellnesswithrebecca.com.

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“You can’t go back and change the beginning, but you can start where you are and change the ending.” ~C. S. Lewis

I started life in a poor household with one parent who left when I was very little, never to be seen or heard from again, and another who stuck around but made it very clear I wasn’t wanted and I had ruined their life by existing.

For some reason, I never had any contact from either of their parents, my grandparents, and very little to no contact from their wider families.

So, as a young child, I knew I had no practical or emotional support. There was no one to fall back on, no one to soften the impact if things went wrong. I needed to stand on my own two feet to survive.

As an abandoned and scapegoated child, I was very independent and resilient, and I was driven by the goal of getting away and creating a life for myself. But I couldn’t take risks or focus on studying because I had no safety net.

During my school exams, I would work full time during the holidays beforehand and part-time during term time. I was then exhausted when it came to exams and had little time to revise. At points in my undergraduate degree, I was working almost full time to keep a roof over my head, always living off my overdraft.

I kept what had happened and was happening at home inside. I never talked about it. No one knew. All of my peers had two parents, and they couldn’t understand my life or provide support. In those days, teachers and other adults weren’t as knowledgeable as they are now, and I was never asked about my home life or offered support. So there was no emotional safety net either.

Since I was responsible for myself financially, I really learned to budget. This meant that when I started in a career in my twenties, I excelled much quicker than my peers. They were learning the world of work following university; I had already been in it for years.

Not Fitting the Mold 

Well into my adulthood, when I found myself in a professional-class world, my friends would assume I was like them. They would talk about people from single-parent families and broken homes as those who would not achieve.

I wasn’t used to talking about my situation. It’s not something that comes up naturally in conversations, and, as with many difficult family situations, people are generally awkward in responding and can, unwittingly, say things that make you feel worse. (I’ve even heard “My father would never leave me!” as if they couldn’t believe it or focus on me at all.)

There isn’t a common toolkit for supporting someone who has been abused or abandoned by their family, and it’s a topic that has only recently started to be more openly talked about in social discourse. So I didn’t know how to talk about myself in an authentic way when it came to family.

On a daily basis, at work or at social occasions, at Christmas or on Mothers’ or Fathers’ Days, people talk about their families of origin and assume others have the same. It’s the norm for most people, and they struggle to support someone who has a different reality.

I realized a few years ago that many of my friends had no idea about my circumstances, so I felt misunderstood and like a core part of myself was unseen.

Filling the Void… or Learning to Live with It

As a young adult, I decided to build a friends’ family, or chosen family, with people I met while studying or through work because I needed to have people around me. Years later, I understood that all my relationships were affected by growing up feeling unwanted and unloved. So I wasn’t discerning about who was in my life and didn’t understand that I had my own needs in relationships. If someone wanted to spend time with me, who was I to say no?

This led to friendships and romantic relationships that were, at best, mismatched without real connection and, at worst, abusive. Also, when the holidays came around, my friends’ family would disappear to be with their real families. So I hadn’t filled the void in my life, despite my energy and efforts.

I was trying to distract myself from the pain of not having a family by developing new relationships. Through therapy, though, I realized that the key is learning to live with the void of what I didn’t have—processing it, facing up to it, and actually feeling that pain.

Reconnecting with myself, particularly my child self, was key. I had to take some of the energy I had expelled outward to please others and turn it inward to learn to cope with my loss, heal, and improve my choices.

An amazing therapist helped me understand that I was living with a form of grief. She explained, “Grief is being attached to something that isn’t there.” I now live with the void and the pain, grieving the feeling of loss and abandonment rather than distracting myself from it. Not trying to fix it or fill it but learning to acknowledge it as part of my story.

While the pain will never fully leave, I now make choices from a place of connection to myself, which has led to more fulfilling relationships and much more energy to put into meaningful activities.

Surviving and Even Thriving

Growing up without a safety net means focusing on survival. Throughout my childhood, I worked hard to get somewhere safe and secure with my own independence. Between these efforts and what I was enduring, I was exhausted. Well into adulthood, I kept working toward building a secure life of my own.

By my mid-thirties, I had some basics: a safe home, financial security, and some good people in my life. That’s when it crept up on me—that I was constantly imagining and planning for terrible things that never happened, that I was always on high alert in normal situations, and that I was exhausting myself with my incessant rumination.

I was still operating in survival mode when I didn’t need to. My body and mind hadn’t caught up to the reality that I was finally safe. I needed to learn to live, not just survive.

Some talk about recovering from trauma as getting back to oneself, but when you endured it throughout childhood, you weren’t given the chance to know who that self is. Who would I be if not in survival mode? I had to discover who the core of me was and learn how to just live.

Realizing this was the first step. I was lucky to have great therapists, a complete course of EMDR to process and re-install new pathways in my mind, group therapy, where I learned from others, and other treatments.

There was a moment during installation EMDR (a process that helps to replace negative beliefs with positive ones) when I was asked to imagine what would have helped me as a child during a difficult experience I’d had.

At first, all I could think of was changing what was happening to me and someone being there to intervene. But then I imagined giving my child self a hug. That’s what she needed in that moment, and in many others.

Since then, I have tried to focus on my needs and nurture myself, which has helped to shift me from just practical surviving to thriving.

It wasn’t easy or immediate, but after a while of going out in the world post-therapy, I noticed I had an abundance of energy. It felt like I had been carrying a dead weight around me my whole life that had lifted, and I suddenly felt lighter in my day-to-day activities.

I was able to identify and move away from unhealthy relationships, which reduced negative, depleting interactions and increased my positive interactions.

I put this energy into nourishing and meaningful activities in my time outside of work—volunteering, researching, engaging in active hobbies. In turn, I got energy from doing them and reached toward my potential. I became myself. Beyond being a victim of my circumstances, I could thrive.

If you’re also navigating life without a traditional family of origin, know that you are living with a little-understood form of grief, and as much as that will never leave you, a loving, safe, and fulfilled life is still possible.

The first step is understanding and processing what happened to you so you can give to yourself the care and nurturing you need. That’s what will give you the strength, resilience, and empathy to thrive.

About Nisha Wilkinson

Nisha Wilkinson holds a PhD in War Studies and has worked on international conflict and security for over fifteen years. She is interested in human behavior driving violence and insecurity, and advocates for socio-economic diversity of voices in state institutions.

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“The loneliness of the connected age is not about being alone. It’s about being unseen in a crowd.” ~Unknown

For a long time I thought I was broken.

Not in a dramatic way. In a quiet, persistent way—the kind you learn to manage so well that most people can’t tell, and eventually you almost can’t tell either.

I had a full life by any external measure. Work I cared about. People around me. Invitations to things. And yet there was this gap I couldn’t close—a feeling I can only describe as being on the wrong side of glass. Present in rooms but not quite in them. Watching conversations happen at a frequency I could hear but not tune into.

I spent years trying to fix myself. I said yes more. I pushed through the discomfort of social situations that drained me. I got better at small talk, which mostly meant I got better at pretending small talk wasn’t quietly hollowing me out.

Nothing touched the actual problem. Because the actual problem wasn’t me.

The moment I started asking different questions

It started with a late night on Reddit—the kind of spiral that usually ends with you feeling worse but this time didn’t.

I’d searched something vague, something like “Why do I feel lonely even around people?” and found myself reading for two hours. Post after post after post from people describing exactly what I’d felt but never named. The specific exhaustion of performing sociability. The hunger for conversations that went somewhere real. The strange guilt of wanting connection so badly while simultaneously finding most social situations depleting.

These weren’t isolated people. They weren’t broken people. They were people who needed a different kind of room.

That realization, so simple, so obvious in retrospect, quietly rearranged something in me. I hadn’t been failing at connection. I’d been looking for it in places built for someone else.

What the research kept pointing to

I became a little obsessed after that. I started reading everything I could find on how people actually form close bonds, not the surface-level advice but the research underneath it.

What I found kept contradicting the conventional wisdom. Proximity and shared interests, the things we’re told to optimize for, matter far less than we assume. What actually creates genuine closeness is something harder to manufacture: shared vulnerability, a similar life stage, the sense that someone else is navigating the same uncertainty you are.

Not “We both like the same music.” More like “we’re both trying to figure out what a meaningful life looks like from here, and we’re both a little lost, and we’re both tired of pretending otherwise.”

For introverts, people who find depth energizing and volume draining, this gap between how connection is supposed to work and how it actually works is especially acute. We need slower, lower-stakes environments to open up. We do better when trust is established before vulnerability is required. We’re not bad at connecting. We’re consistently placed in contexts optimized for the opposite of how we connect.

The Quiet Shift

Understanding this didn’t fix everything overnight. But it changed what I was looking for.

I stopped trying to get better at the contexts that didn’t work for me and started looking for different ones. Smaller gatherings. One-on-one conversations. Online spaces built around specific life experiences rather than general socializing. Places where showing up as you actually are is the point, not the risk.

I also started going first. This was the harder part. Introverts tend to wait for proof that a space is safe before being honest in it, which means we often stay on the surface in exactly the places where depth might be available, because we haven’t tested it yet.

Going first meant being honest a little earlier than felt comfortable. Not performing vulnerability, just offering a real answer when someone asked a real question. It felt exposed every time. It almost always landed.

What I Wish I’d Known Earlier

The loneliness I felt for so long wasn’t a character flaw. It was a context problem.

I wasn’t too much. I wasn’t too selective. I wasn’t fundamentally unsuited to close friendship, though I’d quietly started to believe I might be.

I was just in the wrong rooms. And the right rooms exist; they’re just not always the ones we’re pointed toward.

If you’ve felt that glass wall feeling, that particular ache of being surrounded but not reached, I want you to know that it’s one of the most common things I’ve encountered since I started paying attention. You are not alone in feeling alone in this specific way. And the solution probably isn’t becoming someone who finds loud bars energizing.

It’s finding your room. It exists. Keep looking.

About Fiona Yu

Fiona is the founder of Introvrs (introvrs.com), an app in private beta built for introverts looking for genuine friendship without the performance pressure of mainstream social apps. She writes about connection, introversion, and the gap between how we’re told to socialize and how we actually thrive.

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“Vulnerability is the only path through the wall that separates us from each other.” ~Brené Brown

Every time I share something deeply personal—an article, a post, a piece of my story somewhere or to someone—there is a part of me that lights up with energy. I feel a sense of urgency, a pull to share now. A belief that some humans will need to hear it, relate, and feel less alone. And often, it helps me make sense of my own experiences, too. Even if I’m not always conscious of it, there is a higher reason guiding me.

Storytelling is healing—for the writer, the storyteller, and the reader. Raw, human-truth experiences hold power.

And yet… after pressing “publish” or opening my heart to a friend or loved one, something familiar arrives post-sharing.

A wave. An intensity. Tightness in my chest. A sinking feeling in my belly. Second-guessing.

Did I say too much? Did I overshare? Was that courageous—or careless? Will I still be loved and accepted now that I’ve been seen like this?

I remember the first time I shared something deeply raw in a public post. I wrote about a moment from a yoga retreat when our group was hiking through the Australian rainforest and came upon a little creek that shimmered as if it had been waiting for us. The water was clear, fresh, and utterly inviting. None of us had brought swimsuits—swimming hadn’t been part of the plan.

That didn’t stop some of the women. Feeling free, embodied, and deeply connected, they stripped down and swam naked in the creek. I stood there in quiet awe of their boldness and courage.

I hesitated, caught between wanting to join and the voice of my conditioning: my body wasn’t perfect, not thin enough, too post-motherhood, and I hadn’t shaved in a while…

Eventually, I let go and partly undressed. I stepped into the stream, letting the water embrace me. In that moment, I felt a liberation I hadn’t known I needed. My skin feeling the soothing, cooling effect of the fresh spring on my being. My body—with its newfound curves, softness, and life—was a miracle, a vessel for experience, not a source of shame. I felt so alive.

I hit “publish” on the story with excitement. Immediately post-publishing, the wave arrived: a ball in my stomach, a knot in my solar plexus. Shame. Embarrassment. Did I reveal too much? Was I a women’s coach talking about naked bodies while struggling with insecurities of my own? What would my clients think?

Yet the response was beautiful. Women wrote back, saying the story resonated. Some remembered that magical day. Others recognized their own struggles with body image. Some felt inspired. That first act of vulnerability—raw, imperfect, human—planted seeds far beyond my own awareness.

This experience taught me something essential: the intensity we feel after sharing doesn’t mean we’ve done something wrong. It means we’ve touched something true.

Now, I share more and more of myself: my perceived failures, hopes, insecurities, and the wisdom I’ve gained from experience. I continue to push the edges of my comfort zone, lately sharing very personal matters such as my ADHD diagnosis and, more recently, my strong views on patriarchy and current societal issues.

Each time I step into a space outside my comfort zone, I feel it again: the nervous system’s response, raw and real. But each time, the intensity is a little milder, and I meet it with more patience, compassion, and understanding.

Vulnerable sharing is still an act of truth, trust, and connection.

The Vulnerability Hangover No One Talks About

What I’ve learned is that this emotional aftermath is incredibly common. Some people call it a vulnerability hangover—the emotional comedown that follows openness.

When we share something real, we step out from behind our protection. We let ourselves be seen. And once the moment passes, the nervous system asks a very old question:

“Am I safe now?”

That question can show up as sadness, anxiety, shame, regret, fear of rejection, or the urge to pull back and hide. It doesn’t mean the sharing was wrong. It means we are human—and wired for belonging.

Oversharing vs. Conscious Sharing

For a long time, I thought this wave meant I’d overshared. Now I see it differently.

Oversharing isn’t about how much you reveal. It’s about how and why you reveal it. Oversharing often happens when:

• We share to regulate our emotions instead of first holding ourselves.
• The wound is still bleeding, not gently forming a scar.
• We seek reassurance, validation, or relief from others.
• We share without considering the container or the relationship.
• We feel depleted, ashamed, or fragmented afterward.

Oversharing isn’t a failure—it’s a signal that a part of us needed more support before being seen.

Conscious sharing, on the other hand:

• Comes from self-connection rather than a need for emotional regulation.
• Happens with intention and choice.
• Respects timing, boundaries, and context.
• Leaves us tender but still intact.
• Feels aligned, even if uncomfortable.

Both can feel emotional. Only one honors us.

The Questions That Changed How I Share

Before sharing now—whether in writing or conversation—I pause and ask myself those simple questions:

“Am I sharing from wholeness, or am I asking to be held?”

There is no judgment in the answer. Both are deeply human.

If I’m asking to be held, I know the sharing might be better suited for a private, resourced space—therapy, close friendship, journaling, or simply sitting with myself.

If I’m sharing from wholeness—even a tender wholeness—I trust it more.

“Who needs to hear this, and what truly needs to be said?”

This question invites me to step out of making it about me and into service of the message—the deeper intention and mission of the story.

If the honest answer is that I’m speaking to one specific person I’m upset with, then I know a private conversation would be more aligned.

But if the answer is that this is for women who are living with self-doubt or navigating a similar experience in silence and loneliness, then I trust the story. I trust that it carries wisdom, that it can be healing, and that it is meant to be shared.

When the After-Feeling Still Comes

Even conscious, aligned vulnerability can leave you feeling raw afterward. Feeling exposed does not mean you overshared. It often means you touched something true.

For sensitive, empathic people—those who feel deeply and care deeply—vulnerability activates the nervous system. And the nervous system doesn’t speak in logic—it speaks in sensation.

That’s why how we care for ourselves after sharing matters as much as the sharing itself.

How I Nurture Myself After Vulnerability

I’ve learned not to rush past the aftermath—to meet it with gentleness. An inner river of love.

Here’s what helps me after I’ve shared something vulnerable post:

1. Mark the completion

I consciously close the moment—closing my laptop, placing my phone face down, washing my hands.
I say quietly, “What needed to be shared has been shared.”

2. Come back into my body

A hand on my heart. A deep inhale. A longer exhale. A gentle stretch.

No analysis—just presence. I imagine the intensity of the sensation I feel being wrapped by an inner river of love as I breathe in and out.

3. Witness my courage

Instead of replaying the story, I acknowledge the act:

“That was brave.”

“I didn’t abandon myself.”

“I chose to stand up for myself.”

4. Reclaim my boundaries

I imagine my energy returning to me and repeat the following:

“What’s mine, I keep. What’s not mine, I release.”

5. Ground in the ordinary

A warm tea. A shower. A walk. Something simple and human. Life continues. I am safe.

The Deeper Truth I’ve Come to Trust

For a long time, especially women, we were taught to call truth-telling “oversharing.” Not because it was wrong but because it made others uncomfortable.

The goal is not to be less honest.

We don’t need to soften our stories, hide our feelings, or edit our truth to make others comfortable. Honesty is not the problem—it is the path to connection, healing, and self-understanding.

The goal is to be more loyal to ourselves.

Being loyal means sharing from alignment, caring for our own boundaries, and tending to ourselves afterward.

It means knowing the difference between an open wound that needs more internal support before being shared and a scar that can be safely held in the hands of others.

When we are loyal to ourselves, vulnerability becomes a gift—both to us and to those who receive our story—because we remain intact, grounded, and whole, even as we are deeply seen.

Some stories heal us privately.

Some heal collectively.

Some are seeds planted quietly, without us ever seeing how they grow.

And sometimes, the intensity after sharing is simply the nervous system learning that it is possible to be seen—and still be safe.

A Mantra I Return To

When the doubt creeps in, I repeat:

“I share from wholeness, not hunger.”

“I trust the part of me that chose to speak.”

And I let that be enough.

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