My best friend was pissed at me.

Not quietly disappointed.
Pissed.

She was upset I hadn’t reached out. Upset I hadn’t told her how bad things had gotten. Even more upset that she’d been reading along — watching my slow demise unfold in real time through my writing.

She wanted to know why I didn’t just call her.
Why I didn’t talk to a real human.
Why I disappeared instead of leaning in.

Fair questions.

Except here’s the part no one loves hearing: I didn’t disappear because I didn’t care. I disappeared because I didn’t have the words yet — I didn’t trust my nervous system to stay steady if I started talking. I hadn’t built the nervous system capacity for this yet.

So I did the thing I’ve always done when things feel too much.

I went quiet.
I went inward.
I tried to make sense of it on my own.

When she asked me what actually pulled me out of that spiral, she was expecting something clean. A breakthrough. A method. A sensible explanation she could recognise.

That wasn’t it.

---

When Effort Isn’t the Problem (But Capacity Is)

Here’s what actually caught me off guard.

I wasn’t falling apart because I didn’t want the outcome — growth, traction, something real to build — badly enough.
I was falling apart because I wanted it faster than my system could handle.

I kept asking myself to carry things I hadn’t built the internal structure for yet — and then getting annoyed when that felt hard. Not curious. Annoyed. Like my own nervous system was being inconvenient.

My default move was simple: add more.

If things felt wobbly, I didn’t pause — I accelerated.
More writing. More posting. More being visible online in ways that were meant to stack, build, lead somewhere — if I just didn’t slow down.

More effort meant ambition.
More output meant commitment.
And if it felt edgy or uncomfortable, that just meant I was “doing the work”.

And in hindsight, it’s almost funny how convinced I was that sheer enthusiasm could replace infrastructure. Like my nervous system was supposed to clap politely and keep up.

That logic is seductive because it sounds grown-up. Responsible. Serious.

It never once occurred to me to ask whether the pace I was running at made any sense for my actual body, my actual life, or my actual emotional bandwidth. I just assumed regulation was something you earned later — like a prize you got after proving you weren’t messing around.

That’s the thing about hustle energy: it doesn’t pause to think. It speeds up when questioned. If doubt creeps in, it calls it resistance. If your body hesitates, it accuses you of playing small. And if you even consider slowing down, it whispers that everyone else is moving while you’re about to miss your moment.

So I kept going.

What I didn’t see — until it was embarrassingly obvious — was how familiar this felt. I’d been running versions of this pattern for most of my life. Adjusting internally. Matching tempo. Keeping up so I didn’t get left out.

Same reflex.
Higher stakes.

---

The Pressure I Didn’t Want to Admit Was Mine

And here’s the part that stings a little.

No one was actually doing this to me.

A lot of the pressure I was under was pressure I generated myself. Not because I was delusional — but because I believed that wanting growth and momentum meant I should already be able to hold it.

I expected momentum without building capacity.
Expansion without infrastructure.

I kept raising the bar internally, then judging myself when my system wobbled under the weight of it.

I told myself it was ambition.
But it was impatience dressed up as devotion.

The more I tried to mirror other people’s pace — their certainty, their output, their confidence — the further away I got from anything I could actually sustain.

And that’s when it finally landed.

Capacity isn’t proven by how hard you push.
It’s revealed by how well you can stay present once things start moving.

I wasn’t present.
I was braced.

Which is why, when my system finally hit the brakes, it didn’t look dramatic. It looked dull. Flat. Grey. Like the power had gone out and nobody could tell me when it was coming back on.

Underneath all of it was a belief I’d never really questioned:

If I stop pushing, I disappear.

---

What Actually Shifted in My Nervous System

What changed next wasn’t a strategy.

It was being exposed to a different pace — and realising how foreign it felt in my body.

I didn’t suddenly “learn” something. No framework dropped in. No list of things to fix. What landed instead was a question I hadn’t been asking at all:

Does the way you’re moving actually feel safe to your system?

My brain wanted a plan.
My body just wanted everyone to calm the fuck down.

That question didn’t motivate me.
It didn’t energise me.

It slowed me down in a way that felt almost suspicious at first.

Because I was so used to pressure being framed as progress, urgency as evidence of commitment, discomfort as something to override. I’d built entire identities around pushing through, staying relevant, keeping momentum alive without ever considering my nervous system capacity – I was pretty sure ‘nervous system’ was another vogue term. It turns out there’s growing research around nervous system capacity and how chronic urgency affects regulation.

This was different.

There was no rush to perform coherence.
No insistence that resistance meant fear.
No demand to become someone else in order to move forward.

Just space.

And in that space, something quietly rearranged.

I could feel how braced I’d been. How much of my energy was going into keeping up rather than being present. How often I’d been trying to earn steadiness instead of building from it.

Nothing about my goals changed.
Nothing about my ambition disappeared.

What changed was the tempo I was willing to run them at.

And once that shifted, urgency stopped being fuel.
It started looking like a signal.

Not something to obey — but something to listen to.

---

Where I’m Standing Now (At a Sustainable Pace)

I didn’t quit what I’d started building.
I didn’t burn everything down.
I didn’t “find myself”.

I just stopped running at a tempo that wasn’t mine.

I’m still building. Still writing. Still showing up — just without the constant background hum of urgency telling me I’m behind.

If you’re curious what I was building — and why it mattered enough to stretch me this far — I wrote about it honestly here:
Honest Review of the LiveGood Products and the Opportunity

Turns out I don’t need to disappear to slow down.
I just need to move in a way my system can actually live inside.

Everything else can wait its turn.