How “Doing Fine” Was Actually Holding Me Back

“The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change.” ~Carl Rogers

For most of my life, the story looked like a straight line going up. I never hit bottom. This isn’t that kind of story.

And for a long time, that was exactly the problem.

From the outside, my life looked good. I had built things I was proud of and a family I love. If you knew me, you would have said I was doing well, and you would probably have been right.

So this isn’t a story about hitting bottom. It’s a story about something quieter and, honestly, harder to admit.

I was doing well, and I still knew, somewhere underneath it, that I was capable of more than I was actually giving. And instead of doing anything about that, I had gotten very good at explaining it away.

The Most Comfortable Lie I Told Myself

The lie wasn’t “I can’t.” I had shown myself I could. The lie was “This is fine.”

I was in decent shape, so it was fine. I was around for my family, so it was fine. Life was going well, so it was fine.

Every one of those was true in a way, and that’s exactly what made it so easy to believe.

When your life is genuinely good, it takes almost no effort to convince yourself that good is the finish line. Nobody around you is going to argue with it. The world happily rewards “good” and rarely asks you for more.

But I knew. That’s the part I couldn’t shake.

In the quiet moments, the ones where you’re honest with yourself whether you want to be or not, I knew I was settling for a version of my life that was comfortable instead of the version I was actually capable of.

There’s a difference between being grateful for what you have and using gratitude as a place to hide. I had started doing the second one while telling myself it was the first.

A Month That Was Supposed to Be Temporary

The first real crack in all of that came from something small and almost trendy. On January 1, two years ago, I decided to do a dry January.

There wasn’t a big dramatic reason behind it. I didn’t drink every day, and on paper everything looked fine.

But some of the moments I regret most in my life involved alcohol, and not because of how much I drank. It was because of who I was in those moments.

A version of myself I wasn’t proud of and didn’t want my wife or my three boys to see. So a month off felt like a reasonable little challenge.

It was harder than I expected. I remember being at a cocktail hour to celebrate someone I knew, and somebody asked me why I wasn’t drinking.

It caught me off guard, and then it kept happening. At sporting events, at concerts, at gatherings, the same question, and me standing there feeling awkward about an answer that shouldn’t have needed one.

For a while I was anxious about this, wondering what other people thought about the fact that I wasn’t drinking.

It took time before I stopped caring. And before I realized that the discomfort was never really coming from the room. It was coming from the voice in my own head.

Once I got quiet enough to notice that, I could see that the people I was with and the experience I was having mattered far more than whatever drink was in my hand.

And somewhere in that stretch, instead of counting down the days until I could go back to normal, I decided to keep going.

I wanted to stay in that uncomfortable place a little longer and see who I was on the other side of the thing I usually reached for without thinking.

That’s how the sobriety I’ve now held for over two years began. Not with rock bottom.

It began with a month-long challenge I chose to keep extending, because for the first time in a while, I was doing something specifically because it was hard, not because it was easy.

And what surprised me was how it didn’t stay contained to drinking. That clarity showed up everywhere. In how I took care of myself and in how I showed up at the end of a long day.

The thing I was most proud of wasn’t the not-drinking. It was knowing my boys and my wife were getting the same person at night that they got in the morning.

The Reason I Stopped Waiting

While all of that was still new, life reminded me why it mattered, in the hardest way it could have.

We took the family to Disney World and then to the beach. It was the boys’ first time at Disney and their first time seeing the ocean.

We opened the park in the morning and stayed until the fireworks. Long days, a lot of walking, a lot of laughing.

A few days in, my mom called and said she hadn’t seen my dad and didn’t think he’d come home the night before.

It didn’t make sense. He wasn’t someone who disappeared. But I told her he’d probably left early or was running an errand, and I pushed it aside because we were supposed to be having fun.

The next morning, we took the boys into the ocean for the first time.

We were in the water, laughing, jumping waves, nothing rushed and nothing loud, just being there together.

It was the kind of moment you wish you could slow down, without knowing yet how much you’ll want it back later.

Then my phone rang. The moment I heard my mom’s voice, I knew.

My dad had driven to check on his truck, something he did from time to time, and at some point, he’d had a heart attack and passed away. He was in his fifties.

He was my best friend, the one who helped raise my kids, the one who showed up every time without hesitation.

And I remember standing there in the water while everything around me kept moving. The waves kept rolling in. My kids kept playing.

But I wasn’t there anymore. I had been pulled completely inside my own head, trying to understand how something so permanent could happen in the middle of a moment that felt so ordinary.

The thought I couldn’t get away from was this: I don’t get another chance.

No more conversations. No more asking his advice. No more telling him what he meant to me.

It’s strange how fast your mind starts replaying ordinary moments the second you realize there won’t be another one.

That didn’t just hurt. It changed how I see time.

Because the truth is, time isn’t guaranteed. It doesn’t wait for you to be ready, and it doesn’t slow down when life gets busy.

It just keeps moving whether you’re paying attention or not, and most of us live like we have far more of it than we actually do.

We wait to say the thing. We wait to be more present. We wait to take our health seriously, to chase the goal that matters, to become the person we already know we’re capable of being.

And “later” arrives faster than any of us expect.

What Actually Changed for Me

So I stopped waiting to feel ready, and I started taking ownership of the decision every day.

That word, ownership, is the one that changed things for me.

For years I had treated my better habits like a mood. I did them when I felt motivated and let them slide when I didn’t. Then I used the sliding as proof that this was just how I was.

Ownership took the mood out of it. It meant the decision was already made, and my only job each day was to honor a decision I had already committed to, not to argue about it every time I felt tired or busy or uncomfortable.

My health was where this got real. I couldn’t control everything about how my story ends, especially knowing what took my dad and how young he was.

But I could control whether I was actually taking care of the body my family needs me in, or whether I was quietly telling myself that “good enough” was good enough.

It wasn’t. Not with three boys and a wife who need me here for a long time.

And here’s what surprised me. Owning it didn’t make my life feel heavier. It made it feel lighter.

Because I wasn’t negotiating with myself all day anymore. The question was no longer “Do I feel like doing this today?” The question was just “how?”

That’s a much smaller and much more answerable question, and it gave me back an enormous amount of energy I hadn’t realized I was spending on the daily argument.

If Any of This Sounds Like You

I wrote this for the person who is doing well and quietly knows they’re capable of more.

Not the person at rock bottom, though I have real respect for anyone climbing out of one.

I mean the person whose life genuinely looks good, who has real things to be grateful for, and who has also gotten a little too comfortable calling “good” the end of the road, while some honest voice inside keeps saying there’s more in there.

If that’s you, here is what I would say if we were sitting across a table.

Notice when “I’m doing fine” is doing too much work. Gratitude is real, and it matters. But if you’re using “it’s fine” to avoid looking at a gap you already know is there, that’s not gratitude; that’s a nicer word for settling.

You’re allowed to be grateful for where you are and still decide you want more from yourself.

Do one hard thing on purpose. Not because you have to, but because you may have forgotten what it feels like to choose something difficult when your life doesn’t require it.

That’s what a dry month did for me. Pick something small and a little uncomfortable, and stay with the discomfort instead of reaching past it. You learn a lot about yourself in the staying.

And don’t wait for a phone call to make you serious about your time. This is the one I wish I could go back and tell myself.

The people you love, the health you keep putting off, the person you keep meaning to become—none of that is promised the extra time we all assume it has.

Make the decision once, own it every day, and stop treating the things that matter most like they depend on how you feel that morning.

I’m not writing this from a finish line. I’m writing it as someone still doing this every day, someone who had a good life and decided that good wasn’t the same as living up to what I actually had in me.

That decision cost me the comfort of my easiest excuse. What it gave back was worth far more.

It was the quiet, honest feeling that I’m finally showing up for the people counting on me to be here, and actually being here while I am.

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About Chris Sund

Chris Sund is a keynote speaker and the author of You Are Capable of More: A No-Excuses Guide to Becoming Your Best Self. He is President and COO of Uniti Med, GQR Healthcare, and Nebula, a husband, and a dad of three boys. He writes about growth, ownership, and becoming the person you already know you can be. You can find him at YouAreCapableOfMore.com.

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Emotionally Overwhelmed? 5 Simple Practices That Can Help

“Whatever you’re feeling, it will eventually pass. You won’t feel sad forever. At some point, you will feel happy again. You won’t feel anxious forever. In time, you will feel calm again. You don’t have to fight your feelings or feel guilty for having them. You just have to accept them and be good to yourself while you ride this out. Resisting your emotions and shaming yourself will only cause you more pain, and you don’t deserve that. You deserve your own love, acceptance, and compassion.”  ~Lori Deschene

One cry a day. I have used this four-word phrase to defend my personality for over a decade.

“I always cry at least once a day,” I explain in jest to a new co-worker who is watching in bewilderment as tears roll down my cheeks. She is surprised that letting me cut her in the restroom line elicited such an emotional response. I assure her that the tears are not “bad” and it is not her “fault.” In fact, crying is frequently my go-to response to relatively arbitrary, fleeting moments.

Whatever the emotion, whether it be joy, gratitude, surprise, fear, sadness… you name it, I’ll cry it. The tendency to cry is not a recently acquired characteristic. I’ve been like this for as long as I can remember. I now know that I was born with an emotionally sensitive temperament; however, as a child, I was like, “What is happening to me?!”

My first memory of being overpowered by emotions is from the day my younger sister was born.

When I was six years old, my mom was pregnant with her fourth child. I was tired of being the female meat patty sandwiched between two male bread slices (my brothers), and I fantasized about having a baby sister. On September 14, 1995, Mimi, Aunt Sheila, Eddie, Joe, and I sat around the dining room table in the kitchen of my childhood home in Southern California while my mom and dad were in the hospital.

I (im)patiently awaited the life-changing news, and the phone rang after what seemed like hours. My Aunt Sheila answered and quickly exclaimed, “It’s a girl!” She held my small hands, and we jumped up and down.

I quickly noticed something odd… I was sobbing. What the heck was happening? I thought I wanted a baby sister?! With tears streaming down my face, I looked up to my aunt with fear in my eyes and asked, “Why am I crying?” Aunt Sheila crouched down, smiled gently, and assured me that my tears were not the “bad” kind—these were happy tears.

This moment taught me that there are different types of cries and, more importantly, highlighted a greater personal truth: I am a very emotional person. I do not believe that I have overactive tear ducts; the crying is a concrete representation of my emotions. I follow those tears—my emotions guide me.

High sensitivity is a quality that many possess, especially therapists. “It is good to be in touch with my emotions,” I remind myself during my daily cry. “It’s why I can do the work that I do.”

Growing up, emotional sensitivity impacted my daily life, mainly because big feelings are typically connected to thoughts, physiological sensations, action urges, and behaviors. Big emotions can feel like a tornado whirling me up. Sometimes, the ability to genuinely experience these emotions is exhilarating. Who wouldn’t want to be the girl simultaneously tearing up and jumping up and down because she is so overwhelmingly excited to hear Whitney Houston’s 1987 hit “I Wanna Dance with Somebody”?

Though the flow of tears can be a response to nearly any emotion, I often cry because I am experiencing a less pleasant one. These more difficult feelings are the other side of the girl who is beyond elated because a kind soul allowed her to cut the bathroom line. Unfortunately, humans can’t pick and choose feelings, so I get the wanted ones with the unwanted ones.

At some point during high school, “one cry a day” was no longer a mantra but a benchmark to aspire to: to cry only one time in twenty-four hours. Such emotional reactivity was too much for my self-conscious teenage self. The intensity of the emotion was now coupled with shame and embarrassment.

I believed I was getting too old to respond so emotionally to situations that were “no big deal.” A running internal monologue informed me that everyone around me had more self-control. My inability to handle my emotions was a clear sign that something was seriously wrong with me.

Riding a daily rollercoaster of emotion was exhausting—exhilarating highs were quickly followed by stomach-dropping lows. By the end of high school, I had discovered that I could mediate these ups and downs through a series of behaviors that developed into an eating disorder.

Over the next two years, the quick tricks became compulsive obsessions, steadily increasing in frequency; in time, I needed the eating disorder rituals to function because, without them, the emotional intensity of my daily experience was too much.

In college, I struggled to leave my room, go to class, or socialize with friends without the help of my little friend E.D. (short for eating disorder). After realizing that, despite my desperate determination, I could not stop these behaviors, I begrudgingly went to see a school counselor.

Through weekly cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) sessions beginning my sophomore year of college, I learned that the eating disorder had very little to do with food or weight; it was a way of coping. CBT taught me that my thoughts and feelings about myself led to my actions.

Even after a year of CBT, my understanding of my emotional sensitivity and eating disorder was limited. I was still engaging in eating disorder behaviors on occasion, my relapses correlating to stress levels, and after a tumultuous transition to New York City—nearly ten years after I first developed my eating disorder—the frequency of disordered thoughts and behaviors escalated to a crippling peak. E.D. had won the decade-long game of tug o’ war; my consolation prize was intensive eating disorder treatment.

In treatment, I was introduced to the ultimate game-changer: dialectical behavior therapy (DBT).

American psychologist Marsha Linehan (1993) developed DBT in the early 1990s as a treatment for women diagnosed with borderline personality disorder (BPD). DBT is an approach to therapy that combines behavioral sciences and Zen practices, proposing that pathology is rooted in an inability to regulate emotion.

Though I considered myself to be in touch with my emotions, DBT taught me that I was actively resisting and engaging them, which increased the intensity of the painful feelings. The avoidance resulted in an undercurrent of persistent emotional overloading, leading to increased behaviors—the unending cycle felt impenetrable and unbreakable.

The philosophy of DBT rang true for me, providing me with a compassionate understanding of my emotional vulnerability and the intense shame that I carried as a result of my sensitivity. During treatment, I developed new ways to tolerate and regulate emotion, which ultimately helped me to break the relentless cycle that I felt stuck in before treatment. I learned to ride the waves of my feelings.

While sharing all of the amazing things I’ve learned in treatment and as a therapist is not within this blog post’s scope, I want to discuss my five favorite skills from DBT and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT). ACT is like a sister therapy of DBT, and it’s great because it teaches us to stop fighting our feelings.

1. Stop and notice.

When intense feelings come roaring in, hit the brakes. Take a moment to identify what’s happening inside you.

Ask yourself: What emotion am I experiencing? What physical sensations am I feeling (like that knot in your stomach or a racing heart)? Where in my body do I feel these sensations? What thoughts are taking center stage? What are my instincts pushing me to do?

Remember, the goal isn’t to label your emotions perfectly; it’s simply to hit pause and observe. This empowers you to make choices rather than having emotions dictate your actions. Initially, this can be very difficult because we may feel like we are in a tornado of thoughts, sensations, and urges. Keep practicing—it becomes easier over time.

2. Describe nonjudgmentally.

Articulate your inner experiences using factual, nonjudgmental language. It’s like talking out loud to an impartial observer.

For instance, say, “I’m having the thought that things are hard,” or “I’m experiencing a pounding sensation in my chest.”

Remember: When we are emotional, we want to judge ourselves (i.e., “I shouldn’t be feeling this way!”). Do your best to notice when you are judging your experiences as “good” or “bad.” Judgments often fuel emotional reactivity. By sticking to the facts, you are taking steps to regulate your emotions.

3. Try “defusing.”

Defusion is my favorite skill from ACT! It’s a made-up word that teaches us how to create space between our internal experiences (thoughts, feelings, physical sensations, memories, images) and who we are.

When working with clients, I ask them to think about their emotions as tinted sunglasses. When they feel a big feeling, they see the world through that emotion. Defusion is taking off those shades! You deliberately look at your emotions (like a scientist observing a lab experiment), rather than looking through your feelings (like a person with sunglasses on seeing only a tinted version of the world). There are many defusion strategies, but I encourage you to try this one:

Say, “I am having the feeling of… [insert any emotion, mad-lib style].”

By naming the emotion separate from yourself, you start to “defuse it.” In other words, the language of “I’m having the…” helps you step back and creates space between you and your feelings. This simple act can reduce the intensity of the emotion.

4. Drop the struggle.

Picture this: your emotions are like waves in the ocean. Trying to change or escape them is like trying to stop the waves. It’s exhausting and, ultimately, futile. Dropping the struggle is about letting go of the fight against your thoughts and emotions. Instead of resisting or distracting yourself, accept these internal experiences as part of being human.

When you drop the struggle, you allow emotions to be. It’s not an easy task, but it’s incredibly liberating. You prevent emotions from growing larger and maintain control over your actions.

5. Do what you really want.

You’ve got emotions telling you to do this or that. But what do you truly want? This is where values come into play. Values are your guiding stars, reflecting what you want to be about. When your actions align with your values, you experience a sense of purpose and fulfillment. Discovering your values helps you know what steps to take, especially when big emotions come knocking. It’s like having a personalized roadmap for life’s emotional rollercoaster.

These tools helped me, and I hope you benefit from them too.

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About Mary Kate Roohan

Dr. Mary Kate Roohan is a psychologist and drama therapist based in Pasadena, California. She is the founder of Thrive and Feel and is passionate about teaching evidence-based therapy skills to highly sensitive people (HSPs). You can sign up for Mary Kate's free guide to managing emotions at her website.

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When the Old Life Doesn’t Fit but the New One Isn’t Clear Yet

“We delight in the beauty of the butterfly but rarely admit the changes it has gone through to achieve that beauty.” ~Maya Angelou

There’s a strange season in life when the old ambitions no longer fit, but the new ones haven’t fully formed yet.

A year ago, I asked myself a simple question. Not a vague one. A very practical one.

Is there something I need to do right now to begin fulfilling my purpose and be happy?

And for the most part… nothing. No inner wisdom. No clear message. No cinematic download from the universe. Just silence.

At one point, I did get a strange pain near my breastbone, which fortunately faded quickly but certainly did not feel especially helpful or enlightening.

It was frustrating. Because underneath the question was something much bigger:

How did I get to this point?

How did I get to an age where, if I’m really honest, I’m not entirely sure what would make me happy anymore?

Not unhappy, exactly. Not in crisis. But also not lit up by the future.

And that’s a strange place to find yourself. Because I do know dissatisfaction. That part is familiar.

Even when life looks objectively quite good. Even when, by external standards, things are better than fine. That’s part of what makes it confusing.

From the outside, your life can look stable, successful, even enviable. And still…something doesn’t fully land.

When I was younger, I knew what I wanted. Or at least, I wanted things with conviction.

I wanted to be powerful and rich. I wanted a deeply connected, almost telepathic relationship. I wanted passion, ambition, luxury, freedom.

I wanted to live in a big city and do exciting things. Travel. Belong. Be admired. Be part of something vivid and important.

I also wanted to help my family, remain independent, never be controlled, and never need anyone too much.

So yes, there were a few contradictions in there. But still, there was energy. Desire. Movement. There was a clear sense of pull.

And a year ago? I knew a lot more about what I didn’t want.

I didn’t want to work hard all the time. I didn’t want pressure or constant obligation. I didn’t want a life that felt too full, too demanding, too externally driven.

No relationship that felt all-consuming. Not to be trapped by other people’s expectations. None of the kind of success that costs too much internally.

Many of the things I once wanted started to feel… exhausting.

Living big in a city? Exhausting.

Being deeply embedded in a big social world? Also exhausting.

Being admired? Dangerous, honestly. Because admiration can become its own kind of trap.

And what’s left when all of that falls away? That’s the part I found more confronting than I expected.

Because when you strip away the old ambitions, the old fantasies, the old proof-of-worth desires, sometimes what remains is not a grand new vision. Sometimes what remains is simply: I want to stop.

I want to rest. I want spaciousness. I want freedom from pressure. I want to not have to hold everything up for a while.

And if I’m being especially honest, for a period of time, what I wanted most was to stop working and do absolutely nothing for six months.

Not in a dramatic, burnt-out collapse kind of way. Just in a very sincere “please leave me alone and let me exhale” kind of way.

For a long time, part of me judged that. It didn’t seem ambitious enough. Or evolved enough. Or inspiring enough.

Surely I should want more than that. Surely I should have a dream. A mission. A compelling next chapter.

Surely “I would like to lie down and not be responsible for anything for a while” could not be the true voice of my soul.

But sometimes that kind of desire is not emptiness. Sometimes it’s just information.

Maybe not knowing what you want is not a sign that something is wrong. Perhaps it just means you are no longer available for the life you used to be chasing.

And maybe what comes next doesn’t always arrive as a clear vision. It could arrive simply as a deep fatigue with what no longer fits.

That’s less glamorous, admittedly. But also more honest.

There’s a difference between being aimless and being between identities. Between versions of yourself. Between one way of wanting and another.

And that middle space can feel strangely flat. Because the old desires no longer animate you, and the new ones are still quiet. Still forming. Still somewhere below the noise.

Maybe that’s why forcing clarity rarely helps.

Maybe this is not the kind of season to create a five-year plan. Maybe, this season, life is simply asking you to notice.

What feels heavy. What feels false. What makes your body close. What you can no longer pretend to want.

And maybe that matters more than we think. Because knowing what no longer fits is not nothing. It could actually be the beginning of something far more interesting.

No longer the old dream, and not yet necessarily a better one just yet. But perhaps a truer one, a gentle new exploration of who you are today.

And for a while, that might be enough. Not to know exactly what you want. But to stop insisting it should still be what it used to be.

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About Stefania Dragojlovic

Stefania Dragojlovic is a writer, author, and coach who explores change, self-trust, and the quieter ways we find our way through life. She writes on Substack and Medium about nature, everyday moments, and the gentle balance between structure and flow. You can learn more about her work at stefaniadragojlovic.carrd.

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When “Protecting Your Peace” Is Really Avoidance

“Peace is not the absence of conflict, but the ability to cope with it.” ~Anonymous

My sister called four times before I picked up.

Not four times in one day—four times over three weeks. Each time, I watched her name light up my phone, felt something tighten in my chest, and set my phone face-down on the counter.

I told myself I was protecting my peace. I’d read that phrase everywhere that year. It was on water bottles, on Instagram infographics, on the lock screens of women I admired who seemed to have figured out something I hadn’t. Protect your peace. It sounded so clean. So justified.

What I didn’t tell myself was that I already knew what she was calling about.

Our dad had gone in for tests two months earlier. Nothing had been said definitively yet, but there was a texture to the silence in our family group chat that told me something was coming. And I did not want to be the one on the phone when it arrived.

So I didn’t answer. I told myself I was busy. I told myself I’d call her back when I had more emotional bandwidth. I told myself, genuinely believing it, that avoiding this call was a form of self-care.

It is astonishing, looking back, how completely I convinced myself that hiding was the same thing as healing.

I want to be honest about how far this went, because I think the small, unglamorous details are the only ones that actually mean anything.

I stopped opening texts from my sister and let them sit as unread, because an unread text still technically hadn’t been received, in the strange math I was doing in my head.

I told a close friend, when she asked how my dad was doing, “I’m trying not to think about it too much—I’m protecting my energy.” She nodded like that made complete sense, because it’s a sentence that’s supposed to make complete sense. It has the shape of wisdom. It just didn’t have any of the substance.

I went to yoga more that month than I had in the entire previous year. I meditated most mornings. I said no to a work project that would have been a stretch for me, telling myself I needed to conserve my resources. On paper, I looked like someone taking beautiful care of herself.

Underneath it, I was just a person standing very still with her eyes closed, hoping that if she didn’t move, the thing coming toward her might lose interest and go somewhere else.

The call came on a Thursday. I know it was a Thursday because I remember thinking, absurdly, that Thursdays felt like a strange day for news like this to arrive. News like this seemed like it should come on a weekend, when you at least had two days of nothing to fall apart in.

It wasn’t my sister who reached me first. It was my mother, and her voice had a flatness to it I’d never heard before, like she’d used up all the other tones already on someone else.

She told me the results had come back. She told me the word. She told me my sister had been trying to reach me for weeks because she didn’t want me to hear it like this, alone, from a voicemail.

I sat on my kitchen floor for a long time after that call ended. Not crying, actually. Just sitting, my back against the cabinet, doing an inventory of every unanswered call, replaying them one by one like some kind of confession.

I had thought I was protecting myself from pain. What I had actually done was make my sister carry the weight of trying to reach me, again and again, while she was scared too, while she needed someone on the other end just as much as I was avoiding being that person.

I called her back within the hour. She picked up before the first ring finished, which told me everything about how long she’d been waiting.

“I didn’t know how to tell you,” she said, and I could hear that she’d been crying, probably more than once, probably alone in places where no one had been checking on her either.

“I know,” I said. “I’m sorry. I should have picked up.”

There was a pause, and then she said something I’ve turned over in my mind more times than I can count since: “I kept thinking maybe you already knew somehow, and you just needed space. I didn’t want to push.”

She’d taken my avoidance and turned it into a kindness she was extending to me. She’d assumed my silence meant I was coping in my own way, when really it meant I’d left her to hold something enormous by herself because I didn’t want to feel it yet.

That’s the part that undid me. Not the diagnosis itself, not yet—that grief would come later, in its own long, unfolding way. What undid me in that moment was realizing that “protecting my peace” had not protected anyone’s peace at all. It had just relocated the weight onto someone who loved me enough not to make me feel guilty for dropping it.

In the weeks that followed, I thought a lot about the difference between peace and avoidance, because up until that Thursday, I genuinely could not have told you where one ended and the other began.

Peace, I’m starting to understand, isn’t the absence of hard things. It’s being present enough to face them without being destroyed by them. Avoidance just postpones the facing. It doesn’t remove the hard thing—it only removes you from the room while the hard thing waits, unattended, sometimes growing heavier in your absence.

I’d spent a year building a version of “peace” that was really just very sophisticated hiding. Yoga mats and unread texts. Meditation apps and voicemail boxes I let fill up. I wasn’t protecting my nervous system. I was protecting myself from the discomfort of showing up for something that scared me and calling it wellness instead of what it actually was.

My dad started treatment a few weeks later. I was there for the first appointment. I made myself be there, even though every part of me wanted to find a reason to be busy that day.

I sat in a stiff waiting room chair next to my sister, who reached over at one point and just held my hand without saying anything, the way you do with someone you’ve already forgiven. I remember looking around that room—the fluorescent lighting, the muted television bolted to the wall, a stack of outdated magazines nobody was reading—and feeling, strangely, more peaceful than I had in the entire month I’d spent avoiding the phone.

Not peaceful because everything was fine. It wasn’t. But peaceful in the way that comes from finally standing in the actual room instead of the one you built in your head to avoid it.

I still believe in protecting your peace. I don’t think that phrase is wrong, exactly. I think I was using it wrong.

Real peace, I’ve come to think, doesn’t ask you to disappear from the people who need you. It asks you to find a way to stay—steady enough, resourced enough, honest enough—even when staying is hard. Sometimes the most peaceful thing you can do is pick up the phone on the first call, not the fourth.

I don’t always get this right. I still catch myself, sometimes, reaching for that phrase as a shield instead of a practice. But now, when I notice myself avoiding something and calling it self-care, I try to ask one small question: Am I protecting my peace, or am I just protecting myself from feeling something I don’t want to feel yet?

They’re not always the same question. But they used to sound identical to me.

They don’t anymore.

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About Dakota J. Dawson

Dakota J. Dawson writes about emotional sovereignty, healing, and breaking free from self-sabotage—especially for people-pleasers and overthinkers. Her work explores emotional boundaries, Stoic detachment, and the quiet patterns that keep us stuck, offering gentle, practical strategies to build self-trust and finally choose yourself. Author of UNSHACKLED: How to Break Free from Overthinking, Emotional Chaos, and Self-Sabotage. Get her book here: https://linktr.ee/dakotajdawson

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How the People We Love Live On in Us

“What we have once enjoyed deeply we can never lose. All that we love deeply becomes a part of us.” ~Helen Keller

Growing up, I thought my father was a pack rat.

He never seemed to throw anything away. Bent nails. Odd screws. Washers without matching bolts. Short pieces of lumber that looked too small to be useful. If there was even the slightest chance something might come in handy someday, he found a place for it in the cellar.

I couldn’t understand it.

Why save things you could replace for a few cents at the hardware store?

He would usually just shrug and say, “You never know.”

My father wasn’t a man of many words. Born in 1933, he worked long hours as a plumber, driving a company truck, and was usually gone before I woke in the morning. Many evenings I was already in bed by the time he came home.

He liked quiet while we ate dinner, but once the dishes were cleared, conversation began. He loved to read, watched John Wayne and Aldo Ray whenever they were on television, and every afternoon around four o’clock poured himself a glass of Clan MacGregor Scotch from the green plastic bottle.

Those are the things I remember first.

After he died, my brothers and I spent days cleaning out the cellar.

The shelves were lined with coffee cans full of screws, old hinges, and enough bent nails to build another house if someone had the patience to straighten them. Short pieces of lumber leaned against the wall because they might be useful someday. Every shelf seemed to hold something that someone else would have thrown away years before.

As we worked, I picked up an empty glass jar.

I don’t remember deciding to keep it.

I tore off a strip of blue painter’s tape, wrapped it around the middle of the jar, found a black Sharpie, and scribbled two words across the tape.

Dad’s Jar.

Then I started dropping things into it.

A screw that was still good.

A bent nail that could probably be straightened.

An old hinge.

Little bits and pieces that I knew my father would have saved.

At the time, I thought I was making a keepsake. A small reminder of him that would sit quietly on a shelf.

Life moved on.

The jar stayed where I had left it.

Every now and then I would drop something into it without giving it much thought. A washer. A hinge. A handful of screws left over from a project. It became part of the background, just another jar sitting on a shelf.

Until one ordinary afternoon.

I was working on a project when a perfectly good screw rolled across the floor.

Without thinking, I bent down, picked it up, brushed off the dust, unscrewed the lid, and dropped it into Dad’s Jar.

I stood there for a moment and laughed.

I’d become the pack rat. Not all at once. Slowly. Without ever noticing it happening.

For years I believed the jar was my way of remembering my father. Standing there that afternoon, I realized I had been wrong.

The jar wasn’t preserving his things. It was preserving the way he had taught me to look at the world.

My father never sat me down and explained why he saved bent nails or scraps of lumber. He never tried to convince me that useful things deserved another chance before they were thrown away.

He simply lived that way.

As children, we often think our parents teach us with words. More often, they teach us by the lives they live in front of us.

Without realizing it, I had learned to pause before throwing something away. I had learned to see possibility where I once saw clutter. Somewhere between cleaning out his cellar and working in my own, I had inherited more than a jar of old hardware.

I had inherited his way of seeing.

Over the years, I’ve come to suspect that most families have their own version of Dad’s Jar.

It may not be filled with bent nails and old screws. It may be a recipe card tucked into a cookbook, a worn hammer, a favorite chair, or something that wouldn’t mean much to anyone else.

But if you’ve ever picked up something ordinary and found yourself smiling because of the person it reminds you of, then you already understand why Dad’s Jar still sits on the shelf in my cellar.

Over the years, I’ve come to believe that grief isn’t only about learning to live without someone we love. It’s also about recognizing the quiet ways they continue to live within us.

We honor them not only by remembering their names, but by carrying forward the kindness, generosity, humor, patience, and quiet wisdom they entrusted to us. Sometimes those gifts are found in a family recipe or an old hammer. Sometimes they’re tucked inside a glass jar filled with bent nails and old screws.

Every time I add another screw to Dad’s Jar, I realize I’m not holding on to the past. I’m carrying a small part of my father into the future.

Every now and then I drop another screw into it, and every now and then I hear my father’s voice.

“You never know.”

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About Peter Preble

Peter Preble is a New England essayist, hospice chaplain, and minister whose work explores grief, memory, spirituality, and the quiet wisdom hidden in everyday life. He writes regularly at peterpreble.net, where he reflects on faith, loss, history, and the ordinary moments that quietly shape us.

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A Simple Question That Helps When I Feel Anxious

“In every walk with nature one receives far more than he seeks.” ~John Muir

I used to think life was like an obstacle course, a series of hurdles you either cleared or stumbled over. For a long time, I stumbled a lot.

What I didn’t realize then was how easily repeated setbacks can turn into a habit of expecting the next one. After a while, you stop living in the present and start waiting for the other shoe to drop.

After I graduated from college, I followed the path I thought I was supposed to take. I moved to Philadelphia to begin a master’s degree. I was in my early twenties, working during the day, taking classes at night, and trying to build a life in a city that still felt unfamiliar.

I’d always been an anxious person, but it was usually manageable. Then, without warning, something changed. I’d be sitting in class or standing at work when it felt like my entire body was shaking from the inside.

That’s when the panic attacks began.

At first, they came only occasionally. I’d feel a surge of electricity rush through me, my chest would tighten, and I’d struggle to catch my breath. Most of the time, I could take a few deep breaths and wait for it to pass.

Soon, though, they became more frequent.

I couldn’t concentrate in class or at work. I remember leaving a movie theater halfway through the film because I was certain I couldn’t breathe. I tried therapy for a few sessions, hoping someone could explain what was happening, but nothing seemed to help.

After my first semester, I realized I couldn’t stay in Philadelphia. I packed my car and drove back to Florida, convinced I had failed.

The panic attacks came home with me.

I was twenty-two years old, had no clear direction, and felt as though my mind and body were constantly on fire. To escape the feeling, I started taking walks at a nearby park. There was a small pond there, and beside it stood a large banyan tree.

I found myself drawn to it.

I learned that banyan trees don’t only grow upward. They send roots down from their branches until they become trunks themselves. This one seemed to form a living cathedral, its limbs stretching outward as if making room for anyone who needed shelter. One afternoon, I climbed into the place where the branches divided and sat there.

For the first time in months, I felt peaceful.

Leaning against the bark, I had the strange but comforting feeling that the tree was absorbing some of my anxiety and carrying it into the earth below.

Over the next several visits, I began paying closer attention to the tree. That’s when I noticed something that saddened me. Someone had driven nails into the trunk.

Some of the nails were old and rusted. Others looked newer. Each one felt like a small act of violence against something so generous.

Without really thinking about it, I started pulling them out.

I climbed higher, searching every branch I could reach, prying loose one nail after another. The more time I spent caring for the tree, the more connected I felt to it.

Over the next several weeks, something changed.

My panic attacks became less frequent. When they did come, they no longer overwhelmed me in the same way.

Eventually, I realized that even when I wasn’t at the park, I could close my eyes, picture the banyan tree, and feel my body soften. Decades later, I still return to that place in my mind whenever life becomes overwhelming.

One afternoon, I climbed into the tree with that familiar tightness already building in my chest. I thought I’d found every nail by then, but tucked into a shaded section of the trunk was one I’d missed. It took several minutes of working it back and forth before it finally came free.

As I held the rusty nail in my hand, I realized something.

For those few minutes, I hadn’t thought about my own chest once.

I kept returning to the park. For the first time in a long while, I felt small in a way that wasn’t frightening. I felt like I belonged to something much larger than myself.

Years later, after I got married and became a father, the first place I wanted to take my children was that park.

They loved climbing into those same branches. My daughter even gave the tree a name: Nelly.

Every now and then we still go back. Watching my children settle into the same crook of branches that once held me during one of the hardest seasons of my life fills me with gratitude. Few gifts are greater than passing on a place that once helped heal you.

Looking back now, I think the tree taught me something I had never understood. Anxiety has a way of pulling our attention inward.

Every sensation feels important. Every heartbeat becomes something to monitor. Every thought becomes another problem to solve.

During those years, I spent so much energy watching myself that I almost forgot there was a world beyond my own fear.

The banyan tree invited me into a different way of living. Instead of asking, How do I make this feeling stop? I began asking, What needs my attention right now?

Sometimes it was a rusty nail buried in the trunk. Sometimes it was the breeze moving through the leaves or a turtle slipping silently into the pond. Without realizing it, my attention shifted from trying to manage myself to caring for something beyond myself.

That didn’t mean ignoring my own struggles. Learning to pay attention to my own thoughts and emotions has been an important part of my life. But I’ve also discovered that healing requires another movement, one that turns outward toward the world.

We need moments of self-reflection, yet we also need moments when we become so absorbed in loving, serving, or noticing something beyond ourselves that our anxious minds loosen their grip.

I’ve found that same lesson many times since then. It appears whenever I’m fully present with another person, listening to someone who’s hurting instead of thinking about myself. It appears while watching birds in my backyard, walking through the woods, or sitting beneath a canopy of trees.

Again and again, the natural world reminds me that I belong to something larger than my own thoughts.

Nelly still stands beside that pond.

The rusty nails are gone, but the blessing remains.

Every visit reminds me that while our own inner work is needed, healing doesn’t happen in isolation. In caring for another living thing and paying attention to beauty, we offer ourselves to something beyond our own fears. And when we do, we just might discover that we are the ones being healed.

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About Daniel H. Shapiro

Dr. Daniel H. Shapiro is keynote speaker, author, and mentor. He is passionate about human connection and the stories we carry with us. For more information about his book, The 5 Practices of the Caring Mentor, or his mentoring and speaking services, check out yourinherentgoodness.com.

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I Broke My Patterns and Love Still Didn’t Last

“When a flower doesn’t bloom, you fix the environment in which it grows, not the flower.” ~Alexander Den Heijer

 He was intelligent, well-read, and kind. A good father, careful about protecting his kids from meeting partners too soon. A man with a life philosophy, who kept his word, who told the truth with an honesty that didn’t flinch—and it wasn’t a performance. He wasn’t afraid of healthy conflict; he could sit in a hard conversation without disappearing. And he also happened to be tall, dark, and handsome.

He checked almost every single thing on my list. And I mean that literally. I had a list.

Not the naïve kind you make at twenty-two, wanting someone who likes dogs and doesn’t text in one-word answers. This one came from years of therapy, coaching, and self-excavation—the hard, unglamorous work of tracing my patterns back to their roots, along with the somatic work of feeling and recovery for months after.

I used to fall for a very specific kind of confidence: fierce, determined, unshakeable—the kind we’re trained as women to want, to read as leadership. I called it self-possessed. Most of the time, what I was actually responding to was ego—someone’s certainty about himself, which I mistook for honesty about himself. Those aren’t the same thing, but they can look identical from across a room.

And once I got close enough to see the difference, I noticed my own hand in it too: I’d match that same guarded confidence back at him, keep my cards close, and wait to see if he’d prove himself first. Still playing the games I played at twenty-two. Just calling it discernment now instead of dating.

The search when I found him was different.

This list came from wisdom. From knowing myself. From finally understanding what I needed versus what my nervous system had been trained to chase.

And there he was. So many of my boxes checked. Even the ones I’d stopped believing were possible.

Through all my self-help work, I’d come to believe that if I healed my attachment wounds and changed my patterns—if I did the work and ‘changed the soil’—I’d attract the right person.

Fix the environment, not the flower. And I did fix the environment.

I spent years understanding that I wasn’t drawn to people—I was drawn to feelings. That the electricity I used to mistake for love was often just my nervous system recognizing something familiar. That familiar isn’t the same as good. That a wound has a longing to it too, and trauma bonds feel incredible right up until they destroy you.

I changed what I was available for. I changed what I called home. I stopped romanticizing people who couldn’t meet me and started asking harder questions about why unavailability had ever felt like depth.

And then I met him.

A man in his power. Someone who had looked at his own life honestly and done something about it. Someone whose presence felt like steadiness rather than chaos, like expansion rather than that familiar, addictive ache.

This wasn’t the wound talking. This felt different because it was different. I had done enough work to know the difference. So I let myself go all in.

I won’t excavate what went wrong because that’s not the point of this, and it’s not my story alone to tell. What I will say is this: he couldn’t meet me where I was. Not because he was a bad man—he wasn’t. Not because he hadn’t done his own work—he had. But because even when someone is genuinely good and checks most of the boxes on the list you built with your whole healed self, sometimes they still can’t quite get there with you.

This didn’t feel like the old heartbreaks. I understood my role in those ones. I could trace the wound, name the pattern, understand what my nervous system had been doing. And part of me is still doing that now—looking for answers, searching for ways I could have grown better, flipping over my beautiful petals and trying to find where there is still dirt on them.

And it left me with a question I haven’t been able to answer.

If I changed my soil—and I did—and I attracted someone who matched the new conditions—and I did—and it still didn’t bloom, then why didn’t this relationship work out?

My mind kept searching for answers. Was there another layer of work I hadn’t done? Had I missed something? Was this simply what relationships are—people growing at different speeds, sometimes beyond each other’s reach?

Ultimately, I had to accept that I was sitting in the rubble of something I couldn’t explain away with a pattern, a self-help tool, or an eloquent one-line quote. Which meant accepting that I couldn’t control whether relationships would work out by digging deeper into myself.

I got good at the excavation. I called it tending the soil. But I think, if I’m honest, I was still fixing the flower the whole time.

All that work—the therapy, the somatic recovery, the discernment, the list—some part of me was still trying to become good enough, healed enough, whole enough that the right thing would finally hold. That’s not the environment. That’s still the flower, just working harder to bloom on command.

And it wasn’t only my own flower I was trying to fix. I think some part of me was trying to change his too—hoping the conditions I created, the version of myself I’d built, would be enough to grow something in him that maybe wasn’t there to grow. I didn’t see it while I was doing it. That’s usually how it works.

I don’t have a clean read on which one it was—soil, flower, weather, timing, none of it. Some things don’t come with a reason good enough to hold. This might just be one of them.

I did the inner work, and it still didn’t work out. I could easily keep analyzing where things went wrong, but I realize now it’s time to stop. Not because I’ve figured it out. Because I don’t want to figure it out anymore. I just want to live.

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About Emily Brown

Emily Brown is a transformational coach, writer, and humanities professor who helps women find clarity through the moments that reshape their lives—relationships, career shifts, and everything in between. She's the author of Love Notes: How to Tend to Your Broken Heart, Navigate Your Emotions, & Befriend Your Inner Child After a Bad Breakup or Divorce, writes the Substack newsletter Love Letters by Em, and founded GRLPWRDEN, a Denver-based community for young women finding their footing—because this work starts earlier than we think. EmilyBrownConsulting.com

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When Your Sadness Starts Coloring Everything

“Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response.” ~Viktor Frankl

A few weeks ago, I moved to a new city for a new job, leaving behind a quiet hill town where I had built five years of friendships, routines, and a version of myself I understood well. I told everyone, including myself, that I was excited. Mostly, I was. But underneath the excitement was a grief I hadn’t fully named yet.

I didn’t notice it arriving. I only noticed what it left behind.

It was an ordinary afternoon when I first caught it. The heat outside was thick and relentless, the kind that makes even walking feel like an argument with your own body. I had to cross campus to the canteen just to pack a simple lunch, and by the time I got there, I was fuming. Not mildly annoyed. Fuming.

Then I remembered something else from that same week: I had spent hours preparing a new course. I’d chosen every reading with care and planned each session like it mattered, because it did to me. When the enrollment list came out, not a single student had opted for it. I told myself it was fine. I told myself these things happen. But something in me had quietly deflated, and I hadn’t stopped to sit with it.

That afternoon, in the heat, on my way to pack a sandwich, I felt like everything was going wrong. The sun felt personal. The walk felt endless. When a colleague stopped to make small talk, I felt an irritation so out of proportion to the moment that it startled me.

Something small went wrong later that same day—I don’t even remember what, some minor inconvenience—and it felt enormous. Disproportionate. Like one more piece of evidence in a case I was quietly building against my own life.

For a moment, I genuinely believed the problem was the heat. The canteen. The empty course. The small inconvenience. Each one felt like its own separate, legitimate grievance.

Then I asked myself one honest question: Am I really angry at all of these things, or am I carrying a sadness that has started to color everything?

I sat with that question longer than I expected to. And the honest answer was uncomfortable: I was grieving a life I had chosen to leave, even though leaving had been the right decision.

I was disappointed that a class I cared about hadn’t found its students.

I was tired in a way that had nothing to do with the weather.

And instead of feeling any of that directly, I had let it leak sideways into everything around me, disguised as irritation at the heat, the walk, the small talk, the inconvenience.

This is something I think many of us do without realizing it. Sadness rarely announces itself directly. It’s quieter than that, and sneakier. It doesn’t say, “I am grieving.” It says, “This heat is unbearable.” It doesn’t say, “I feel disappointed and a little bit like a failure.” It says, “Nothing is going right today.” It borrows the voice of whatever is nearby and speaks through it instead.

I once heard an old story about a warrior who, right before an important battle, put down his weapon and admitted he couldn’t go on. He wasn’t shamed for it. He was allowed to grieve, allowed to feel confused, even allowed to sit in his uncertainty for a while. But he wasn’t encouraged to stay there indefinitely, either. He was gently guided back toward clarity, not by denying what he felt but by learning to see it clearly instead of letting it color everything else.

That distinction has stayed with me since I first heard it: there is a difference between feeling an emotion and living inside it. One is a visit. The other is a residence.

When sadness moves in and starts narrating your life instead of just passing through it, the traffic stops being traffic. It becomes proof that the universe is against you today. The heat stops being weather. It becomes one more thing you have to endure on top of everything else. A small disappointment stops being a single event and becomes evidence for a much larger, much bleaker story: that nothing in your life is going right.

The tricky part is that none of this feels like a story while it’s happening. It feels like the truth. It feels like an accurate report on how bad things are. That’s what makes it so easy to miss.

You don’t experience it as “I am sad and it is affecting my perception.” You experience it as “everything today is genuinely terrible,” and you go looking for reasons to confirm it. And you always find them, because there’s always a hot afternoon or an inconvenient errand or an unanswered message you can point to.

I don’t think the answer is to suppress the sadness or perform positivity over it. I tried that for about a day, and it didn’t work. Telling myself I was fine when I wasn’t just added a second layer of exhaustion on top of the first.

What helped instead was smaller and stranger. I started asking myself, in moments of disproportionate irritation, a very simple question: Is this really about what’s in front of me, or is something older speaking through it?

Sometimes the answer was genuinely just “I’m hot and tired,” and that was fine too. But sometimes the answer was “I miss my old life,” or “I’m disappointed in myself,” or “I feel like I’m starting over and I’m scared it won’t work out.” Naming it correctly took away its disguise. And things without disguises are much easier to hold.

I also started separating the sentence “This moment is difficult” from the sentence “My whole life is difficult.” They sound similar, but they are not the same claim. The first one is almost always true and usually temporary. The second one is rarely true and almost never provable, but sadness will happily hand it to you as if it were fact, and in a low moment, you’ll believe it.

Healing, I’m learning, isn’t the absence of pain, and it isn’t pretending the pain isn’t there. It’s closer to this: letting the feeling exist without letting it drive. You can let sadness sit in the passenger seat, even let it speak sometimes, without handing it the keys to interpret every single thing that happens to you that day.

Some days I still get it wrong. I still snap at something small and realize twenty minutes later that the small thing was never really the problem. But I catch it faster now. And catching it faster has made an enormous difference, not because the sadness disappears, but because it stops being allowed to write the whole story of my day.

If you’re in a season where everything feels irritating, heavier, and harder than it should be, it might be worth pausing and asking the same question I asked myself that afternoon: is this really about what’s in front of me, or is something quieter asking to be noticed?

You don’t have to fix it immediately. You don’t even have to feel better right away. You just have to notice who’s actually driving.

Because every new day deserves to be met with fresh eyes, not filtered through yesterday’s tears.

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About Dr. Kalyani Abhyankar

Dr. Kalyani Abhyankar is an academic and writer with a long-standing interest in storytelling as a tool for personal and professional growth. She writes about navigating transitions, emotional resilience, and finding clarity in ordinary moments. You can find more of her reflections on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/kalyaniabhyankar/

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