The Risk of Letting Good Things In
You tell yourself you’re just busy. That once things settle down, you’ll rest. You’ll slow down. You’ll finally have space to breathe. But things never settle. The to-do list regenerates overnight. The calendar stays full. And even when you do have time, you fill it. Scroll. Clean. Plan. Anything but stillness.
Because here’s what you know but haven’t said out loud yet: you’re not afraid of being unproductive. You’re afraid of what you’ll feel if you stop.
Busyness isn’t the problem. It’s the strategy. It keeps you moving so you don’t have to feel: the grief of what you never got, the anger at how much you had to sacrifice, the loneliness of being seen as strong when you were barely surviving, the regret of all the years you spent performing instead of living. Stillness doesn’t just mean rest. It means reckoning.
And if a part of you learned early on that feelings were dangerous, that sadness made you a burden, anger made you unsafe, and need made you unloveable, then staying in motion became survival. You weren’t lazy. You weren’t weak. You were smart. You kept yourself busy enough that the feelings couldn’t catch up. But they’re still there. Waiting.
In IFS terms, there’s a part of you that believes if you stop, you’ll fall apart. Not metaphorically. Literally. Like the structure holding you together will collapse, and you won’t know how to put yourself back. This part isn’t irrational. It’s seen what happens when people slow down. They quit jobs they’ve built their identity around. They leave relationships they’ve been performing in for years. They realise how tired they are and how long they’ve been tired. This part thinks: if we stop, we’ll have to admit how much we’ve lost. How much we’ve endured. How angry we are. How alone we’ve been. So it keeps you moving. Not to punish you, but to protect you from a grief it doesn’t think you can survive.
You can’t outrun what’s inside you. The feelings don’t disappear because you’re busy. They accumulate. They show up as exhaustion that sleep doesn’t fix, irritability you can’t explain, a hollow feeling even when you’re "succeeding", relationships that feel distant because you’re never fully present, and the creeping sense that you’re living someone else’s life. The longer you run, the heavier it gets.
And here’s the truth you already know: the thing you’re running from isn’t going to kill you. But running from it might.
I’m not going to tell you to "just rest". You’ve heard that. It didn’t help. What I will say is this: stopping doesn’t mean you fall apart. It means you finally let yourself feel what you’ve been carrying.
And yes, that will be hard. It might look like crying in the middle of the day for reasons you can’t name, feeling rage at people who "didn’t mean any harm", grieving the version of yourself you had to abandon to survive, and sitting with the uncomfortable truth that you’ve been running for a very long time.
But here’s what also happens: you stop performing. You stop bracing. You stop waiting for the other shoe to drop.
You don’t have to be ready for this. You don’t have to know how. You just must stop telling yourself that staying in motion is keeping you safe. It’s not. It’s keeping you tired.
This week, notice:
What happens when you have unstructured time?
Do you fill it immediately?
When you consider slowing down, what feeling shows up first?
Anxiety? Guilt? Fear? If you weren’t running, what would you have to face?
You don’t have to answer yet. Just notice.
Next week, we’ll talk about the part of you that already knows you’re allowed to stop. The one that’s been waiting for you to come home.
This reflection was inspired by themes from Worthy: How to Believe You Are Enough and Transform Your Life by Jamie Kern Lima. I'm reading it alongside some of my clients this season. If you'd like to read alongside with me, the link to the book is https://amzn.to/42Eq8Xe
