There’s a moment — right before clarity — where I always hesitate.
It’s the split second where I wonder:
Am I the asshole?
Am I being arrogant?
Is this just my ego defending itself?
I don’t post from certainty alone.
I post from wrestling.
Because I can feel it when dysregulation reaches for me.
It’s physical.
A tightening in my throat.
The almost-magnetic urge to explain, soften, justify — to meet chaos halfway so no one feels alone in it. Ug! Even writing that I can feel it. Ug.
That’s the hook.
And for years, I took it. Yes I did.
I called it kindness.
I called it love.
But it always left me tired.
A little hollow.
A little less myself.
And here’s what I’m learning, right here, right now, this morning:
Choosing regulation costs something.
It costs friendships that were built on shared reactivity.
It costs belonging in rooms where intensity substitutes for intimacy.
It costs the familiar warmth of being needed to stabilize someone else’s storm.
When I stopped bending my signal, some people didn’t get angry.
They just… disappeared.
That hurt more than conflict ever did. Trust is I kind of liked the conflict… and can you believe this, kept the conflict going for the sake of feeling the fullness of it vs the emptiness of moving on. Wow.
And still — clarity came.
Not as a thought.
As a settling.
I realized something simple and brutal:
I cannot regulate someone and stay honest.
I cannot love people by collapsing myself.
And I cannot keep calling self-betrayal “compassion.”
So I stopped teaching to the most reactive nervous system in the room. (boom!)
Not because I’m better.
But because I’m tired of losing myself.
Now, when the pull comes —
when someone’s chaos tugs at my field —
I feel it, I breathe, and I stay.
I don’t argue.
I don’t convince.
I don’t chase.
Some people leave.
I grieve that.
And something else happens too:
The ones who can hold their own signal recognize mine instantly.
Not by what I say.
But by what I truly have become.