Everything Else Can Wait Its Turn: Finding a Sustainable Pace
How I Realised My Pace Wasn’t Sustainable
Everything else can wait its turn.
I wrote that at the end of my last piece, and it wasn’t meant as a conclusion. It was a marker — a way of naming where I had finally landed.
I didn’t quit what I’d started building.
I didn’t burn everything down.
I didn’t reinvent myself.
I changed my pace.
This is about how I found a sustainable pace my system can actually live inside — and what it took to get there.
The Wobble Before the Pace
Finding a sustainable pace didn’t happen gracefully.
Last year was intense. I put huge expectations on myself to bring a side project to life, and by December my body was waving red flags while my mind was still shouting encouragement from the sidelines. I’ve written more honestly elsewhere about what I’m building — and the pressure I put on myself while doing it — here.
I told myself I was slowing down.
In reality, I was still running traffic everywhere.
Thinking.
Planning.
Scanning.
Trying to stay ahead of myself.
By Christmas, it all collapsed.
I was irritable, distant, overwhelmed. At one point I genuinely thought about running away from my family — not dramatically, just quietly disappearing because I didn’t trust myself to stay present without snapping. That scared me more than the exhaustion itself.
After Christmas, there was nothing left to push.
I didn’t have clarity or momentum. I landed in what I can only describe as a grey soup — foggy, heavy, unproductive — and for once I didn’t try to rescue myself from it.
I let myself feel how unsustainable my pace had been.
That was new.
Slowing Down Isn’t the Calm Part
Here’s the thing no one really tells you about slowing down: it doesn’t immediately feel peaceful.
In the weeks after I stopped pushing, things went quieter — externally and internally — and my nervous system did not appreciate that nearly as much as I thought it would.
Without the constant sense of momentum, I started scanning for proof that I was still here. Still relevant. Still building something that hadn’t quietly stalled while I wasn’t looking.
That’s when the checking crept in.
I found myself googling — twice — how long it takes for bloggers to become “known,” as if there’s a universal timeline that could reassure me I wasn’t disappearing in slow motion. I hovered over Facebook, wondering whether I should put something out there. Let people see. Let something reflect back.
Not because I wanted attention.
Because the quiet was asking questions my nervous system didn’t yet know how to answer.
I wasn’t rushing again.
But I was watching.
This was urgency without the steering wheel — low-grade, persistent, and deeply invested in making sure this slower pace wouldn’t cost me everything. There’s growing research around how chronic urgency affects nervous system regulation — something I didn’t take seriously until my body forced the issue.
The Soup, the Waiting, and Wanting to Go Deeper
The slowdown itself didn’t arrive as insight or strategy.
It arrived as necessity.
After Christmas, I landed fully in the grey soup — not dramatic, just heavy. No appetite for pushing. And for the first time, I didn’t turn that into a problem to solve.
I stayed with it.
I did some of the work. I felt things properly. I let patterns surface without immediately acting on them. And somewhere in that quieter stretch — on December 27th — I came across Alex’s work on Facebook and signed up for the $7 Manifest AI experience.
Then I had to wait.
Which, by that point, was infuriating in a very specific way.
I wasn’t panicking anymore. I wasn’t collapsing. I was ready. Ready to go deeper, ready for something to hold the pace I’d slowed into — and now there was a date on the calendar telling me I couldn’t start yet.
So I did what I could.
I watched the bonus material. Long, unpolished recordings.
And somehow, that mattered.
Nothing about them asked me to pull myself together first. I could listen while still in the soup — foggy, cautious, half-present — and nothing bad happened. I didn’t need to fix the feeling or turn it into something useful.
Alex was blunt. Funny. Occasionally rude in a way that felt clarifying, not cruel. No performance of calm. No spiritual gloss. She named urgency, avoidance, self-betrayal plainly — without making any of it mean I was doing life wrong.
It landed clean.
Like freshly washed underwear. Or crisp linen. That kind of clean — unmistakable, and immediately better than whatever I’d been tolerating before.
What surprised me most was how doable staying felt.
Not staying productive.
Not staying positive.
Just staying with myself without immediately trying to turn awareness into action.
Something in me stopped pushing back.
Where the Pace Became Sustainable
By the time the full immersion began in mid-January, I wasn’t looking for answers.
I was looking for containment.
I’d already slowed down. I’d already felt the soup. What I needed was a place where that pace wasn’t something I had to justify or manage on my own.
That’s what changed.
I stopped forcing momentum and found a sustainable pace instead.
Not my ambition.
Not my direction.
My relationship to tempo.
For the first time, slowing down didn’t feel like failure or risk. It felt livable.
Naming It
If you’re curious about the work I’ve been referring to — the Manifest AI experience I mentioned earlier — this is where I first entered it.
I don’t know what shape it will be in by the time you’re reading this. Programs evolve. Pages change. People refine things.
What I do know is that this was the point where my relationship with pace shifted from something I was trying to control into something I could actually live with.
So I’m leaving the link here, simply because it belongs to the story.
You can do with it whatever you like.
