Cold the Whole Time...
I heard something today that stuck. Not even the whole thing. Just a piece of sound slipping out of my phone while I stood at the counter, drinking coffee that tasted wrong but felt familiar enough to finish.
It landed somewhere I usually keep occupied so I don’t have to sit with it.
Some people hurt you in obvious ways. That part is easy to name. But there are others who wear you down more quietly. You keep adjusting yourself around them. Lowering your voice. Running conversations ahead of time in your head like bad practice reps. You start thinking maybe if you pause longer, say less, bend a little more than last time, something might finally land.
Usually, it doesn’t. It just keeps going, same shape, same weight.
I think a lot of us mistake persistence for virtue. Like staying means we are doing the right thing. Like effort automatically equals love. But effort can also be the way you fade out without realizing it. You start waking up already tired. Your body goes flat when they walk into the room. You catch yourself monitoring instead of responding. That’s the part that gives it away, even when you keep telling yourself you’re fine.
I used to tell myself that leaving meant I’d come up short somewhere. Missed a step. Quit before the work was done.
Some days that story still pops up. Other days it loosens and I notice things I didn’t before. How tight I’d been. How normal that felt. Like standing up and noticing the chair was cold the whole time. You don’t catch it until after. When you’re already moving.
This time of year, turns the volume up on things you were already trying not to hear. Quiet rooms do that. So does being around people who feel easy, then noticing how your chest loosens without effort. Or hearing laughter drift down the hall and feeling both comforted and oddly displaced by it. That mix doesn’t wrap itself up neatly, no matter how much people like to pretend it does.
You can care a lot and still know you can’t remain where you are. That realization doesn’t come with a clean explanation or a moral win.
Both things stay true at the same time. My head keeps looping anyway, like that’s going to fix it. I kept trying to nail it to the wall for a while. Didn’t help. Eventually I just stopped messing with it.
It’s not a scorecard thing.
I don’t really have a point to hand you. Just this quiet awareness that sometimes leaving is the only honest move left. It doesn’t feel heroic. It feels unfinished. A little clumsy. Like closing a door without knowing exactly where you’re headed next.
That’s where my head went today. Tomorrow it might land somewhere else. That happens.
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Really apreciate this framing. The line about mistaking persistence for virtue cuts deep because it names something most people won't admit, that staying can be its own kind of slow erasure. The cold chair metaphor works too, that delayed awareness of discomfort that only becomes obvious in retrospect. Been there with a mentorship that felt off but I kept showing up because leaving felt like failur.