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The Hardest Thing About Looking For Work Is Not The Rejection. It Is The Silence After It.

 I want to tell you about a period of my life that I do not talk about much. I was travelling. Not for leisure, not for adventure, but because I genuinely believed that showing up in person, physically putting myself in front of employers, proving through the simple act of being there that I was serious, would make a difference. It did not make a difference. I collected rejections the way some people collect receipts. Hundreds of them in the space of a single month. Some came as emails. Some came as silence, which is its own kind of answer. Some came after interviews that felt like they went well, where I walked out thinking maybe this is the one, and then heard nothing for days, then weeks, then nothing at all. And somewhere in the middle of all of that I found myself sitting with a question I did not know how to answer. Is this worth it? Do I keep going? And if I do keep going, what exactly am I supposed to be going towards? The thing nobody prepares you for Everyone tells...
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What Nobody Talks About When Your Partner Is Struggling And You Are Drowning Too

 There is a version of family stress that does not have a clean name. It is not abuse. It is not neglect. It is not something you can point to easily and say that, that is the problem, that is what is breaking me. It is something quieter and more complicated and in many ways harder to carry because of how invisible it is, even to the people closest to you. It is what happens when the person you built your life with is going through something genuinely difficult, something real, something that deserves compassion, and in the middle of all of that you are also falling apart, also exhausted, also running on empty, but nobody is asking how you are doing because all the attention, understandably, is pointed somewhere else. I want to talk about that person today. The one who is holding everything together. The one who gets up and goes to work and comes home and deals with whatever the day has brought and puts the children to bed and lies awake in the dark wondering how much longer the...
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When Everything Feels Too Much And You Don't Know Where To Start

 There are days when everything just lands on you at once. Not one big thing. Just everything. All of it. At the same time. The responsibilities, the noise, the expectations, the things you haven't done yet, the things you did wrong, the things people need from you, the things you need that nobody is asking about. It all arrives together and your brain just kind of stops. You're not sad exactly. You're not angry. You're just completely overwhelmed in a way that makes even the smallest decision feel impossible. Someone asks you what you want for dinner and you genuinely cannot answer because your head is already so full that one more thing, even something that small, feels like too much to hold. I know that feeling. I've been in it. And I've spoken to enough people who've been in it to know that it is one of the loneliest experiences there is, partly because from the outside you look completely fine and partly because you can't even explain it properly...
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Dear Younger Me: What I Wish Someone Had Said Before The Burnout

 Dear younger me, I want to write to you from the other side of something you're heading towards and don't know it yet. You look fine right now. Actually you look better than fine. You're productive and capable and people rely on you and you take that seriously in the way you take everything seriously. You show up, you deliver, you figure things out. You're the person who gets things done and somewhere along the way that became the most important thing about you, the identity you wore so long it started to feel like your actual self. I want to tell you some things I wish someone had told me then. You are not a machine I know you know this technically. But you don't live like you know it. You live like rest is something you earn by finishing everything first. Like slowing down is something you'll do when things calm down, which they never do because there is always something else behind whatever just got finished. You have quietly built a life in which your...
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 It usually arrives somewhere around 4pm. You've had a reasonable weekend. Nothing particularly bad has happened. You've rested, or at least you've tried to. And then Sunday afternoon rolls in and with it comes something that is hard to name precisely but impossible to ignore. A heaviness. A flatness. A low-grade dread that settles somewhere in your chest and doesn't budge regardless of what you do to distract yourself from it. The Sunday feeling. Most people, when they try to explain it, say it's about Monday. About going back to work, to the routine, to the alarm and the commute and the inbox and everything the week is going to demand from them. And that's not entirely wrong. Monday is certainly in the room. But I've come to believe that Monday is more of a trigger than a cause. That the Sunday feeling, when you trace it all the way back, is telling you something more complicated and more important than simply that you'd rather not go to work tomor...
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What Happens To Your Body When You Suppress Your Emotions For Too Long

  There' s a version of coping that looks incredibly functional from the outside. You don't cry when you probably should. You don't bring things up because what's the point of making it into a whole thing. You get on with it, you push through, you file the difficult feeling somewhere internal and you carry on with your day because there are things to do and people who need you and falling apart is simply not on the schedule. Most people who do this don't think of it as suppression. They think of it as being strong. Being practical. Not being dramatic. Not burdening other people with things they can't change anyway. And in the short term it works. The feeling goes somewhere. The day continues. Nobody has to deal with anything uncomfortable. But here is what I've come to understand about emotions that don't get expressed. They don't disappear. They don't dissolve quietly in the background while you're busy getting on with things. They go somewh...
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I Ran On Three Hours Sleep For Months. Here's What Finally Switched It Off.

 I want to tell you something I don't think I've said directly on this blog yet. For a long time I ran on about three hours sleep a night. Not by choice. Not because I was busy or because I had somewhere to be or because I was one of those people who genuinely function well on less. I ran on three hours because my brain simply would not stop. The moment my head hit the pillow it was like someone turned a switch on. Every thought I'd managed to hold at arm's length during the day came flooding in at once. Things I'd said. Things I should have said differently. Problems I couldn't solve tonight but couldn't stop trying to solve anyway. Worries that had no clear shape, just a weight, just a low hum of something isn't right even when I couldn't name what the something was. I'd lie there watching the hours tick by. 1am. 2am. 3am. Eventually falling into something shallow and broken that technically counted as sleep but didn't do what sleep is s...
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