Reminders for myself

learning to name what i feel. it’s strange how much energy goes into avoiding clarity. for years, every feeling in me was labeled “stress.” but stress was just a blanket; underneath were dozens of smaller truths: worry, guilt, resentment, fatigue, longing. when you name things precisely, you give them edges. they stop leaking into everything else. i started saying to myself: this is sadness. this is irritation. this is fear pretending to be control. and suddenly, the feeling would shrink to its real size. so much mental noise is just emotion waiting to be recognized.

You don’t have to keep proving you’re a good person by staying in bad situations. Choosing yourself doesn’t make you selfish. It makes you sane.

The hunger to be everything was only ever a longing to be loved.

Because when you stop translating your truth for other people's comfort, you don't become harder to understand. You become impossible to misinterpret by anyone who was actually listening. And those are the only interpretations that were ever going to matter anyway.

When you stop translating, extraordinary things happen. Your creative, social, and intellectual bandwidth expands dramatically. The cognitive load of constant performance was enormous—every conversation where you were editing rather than expressing depleted resources that could be directed toward creation, insight, genuine connection.