What Remains When You Stop Performing
There Comes A Time Where You Stop Trying
And Then:
You have understood enough.
Changed enough.
Carried enough.
Tried hard enough to become the person you thought you needed to be.
There comes a time when the movement is no longer forward.
It is inward.
A return to what is already here.
This can come with grief. The stories that held a life together begin to fall away. The meanings we made. The roles we inhabited. The people we thought we had to be. Even the stories that once protected us may no longer be true.
And beneath them, something much simpler remains.
What is here.
What is true.
What is yours.
Not another version of yourself to become.
Yourself.
If this path calls you, you will know.
You may have spent years understanding yourself.
Naming the patterns.
Tracing the history.
Trying to heal.
Trying to change.
Trying to become more whole.
And still, there can come a point when even that becomes another story about who you are supposed to be.
This is for the moment after that.
When the old meanings begin to loosen.
When grief comes with what is falling away.
When certainty is no longer the goal.
And what remains is simpler.
What is here.
What is true.
What belongs to you.
No more becoming.
Just the slow return to yourself.