Cryptic KGs

People told me I'd be fine. I never believed them. And they were right, but that didn't matter. You can't be told your way into this one.

I can't help you with words alone. But here's what it looked like from the inside.

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There was this weight I carried for a long time. I couldn't name it. I couldn't point to it. It was just there, every morning when I woke up, every time I looked at my to-do list, every time someone pushed back on one of my ideas. Heavy in a way I had just accepted as normal.

I only started to understand what it was by putting it down. And even now, sitting here writing this, I'm finding ways to avoid it. Staring at the screen. Getting up for water. Doing anything but finishing the sentence.

That tells me something. Labelling it makes it real. And some days, I'd rather it stay invisible.

The weight had a few different forms, though I didn't see them as connected at the time.

There was resentment, quiet, hidden, the kind you don't admit to yourself. There was the need to prove people wrong. Not loudly. Just in the background, this engine running underneath everything I did. Every project, every late night, every extra thing I piled on, some part of it was pointed outward. At someone. At some version of how people saw me.

There was also the degree I never got. For years I used that as the explanation for everything that wasn't going right. The reason I wasn't further along. A clean, external reason I could point to so I didn't have to look at anything else. I think they call that projection.

And then there was just the work itself, too much of it, stacked on top of itself. A worldview that said: if you're not succeeding, you're not doing enough. So I did more. And more. And proved I could take it. But at a cost I wasn't keeping track of until the bill came due.

Mid last summer I was in a dark place. I wasn't dramatic about it. I kept moving, kept producing. But I was running on something toxic and I knew it, even if I couldn't name it yet.

What started to shift wasn't one moment. It was gradual. Some reading. Some honest conversations with people I hadn't talked to in a while. Some space I finally gave myself that I'd been refusing to take.

Slowly, without me fully noticing, the fuel changed.

Here's the thing about carrying weight for a long time: you stop feeling it. It just becomes the baseline. You think that's what effort feels like. That tiredness every morning is just what mornings are. That defensiveness when someone challenges you is just who you are.

You don't realize how much it was costing you until you set some of it down.

I'm not going to sit here and tell you I fixed it. I still wake up tired some days. I still act out when I shouldn't. The difference is I can see it now. I catch it mid-sentence instead of three days later. That gap between the person who never notices and the person who does, that's where things start to change.

I'm not writing this from the mountaintop. I'm writing it from somewhere in the middle of it. Still working things out. Still carrying some of it.

But the load is lighter. And not because I grinded my way to lighter, because I started putting things down that were never mine to carry in the first place.

That's the thing nobody can tell you, even when they try. Even when they're right. You have to live your way to it.

All I can say is: when you do, you'll know.