sometimes i look at my to-do list and laugh, because wow, i am still moving like the whole world will fall apart if i breathe for one second.
isn’t this the part where it’s supposed to get easier? didn’t i earn some slow mornings and deep trust after all the hustling and the heartbreak and the gut-it-out years? you’d think i’d be sleeping in and drinking coffee slowly in barcelona by now. instead there’s still that old drumbeat going, the one that says if you let up, something slips away.
it’s honestly wild. i worked so hard to crawl out of survival mode, and some days it’s like my body is stuck in a group chat with my past self and she will not stop texting. keep going. don’t stop. faster. the chaos is gone and the urgency stayed behind anyway, just in case, like a smoke alarm that still goes off when you make toast.
i’m not going to romanticise it. choosing rest is still a leap of faith most days. the urge to hustle, to prove, to outwork every what-if is alive and well at 9am and at 2am and basically any time i sit still long enough to notice it.
but something is shifting, slowly and not very gracefully. i’m learning to pause for no reason. not because i’ve earned it or ticked enough things off, just because i want to.
i used to think healing meant never feeling anxious again. that one day i’d wake up as someone who doesn’t flinch at a free afternoon. that’s not what it is. what it actually looks like is giving that hustler part of me a seat at the table, letting her talk, and then gently telling her we’re building something different now. i notice the urge to sprint. i thank it for getting me this far. and on a good day i slow down by a bit. not a lot. a bit.
nothing bad happens if i chill for a minute. i have to say that to myself out loud sometimes, which tells you roughly how much i believe it.
i’m proud of the girl who survived and built the foundation. she is the reason i’m here, genuinely. but i am tired of living like panic is the price of admission. i don’t want to hand that to anyone else as advice. and i don’t want to still be running from a city i left years ago.
so i’m figuring it out. there are days i nap and feel weirdly brave about it. days i can’t sit still at all. days where the only thing i’m sure of is that showing up, aware and grateful and a bit of a mess, counts for something.
today that’s enough. if you’re in the same middle bit, i’m in it too.
eda x