I used to think exhaustion meant I was doing something wrong.
That if I were clearer, stronger, or more organized, the drain wouldn’t be there.
I didn’t yet have language for regulation, only the sense that I should be able to manage better.
For a long time, I treated energy loss as a personal failure. If something felt heavy or depleting, I assumed I hadn’t planned well enough, thought it through thoroughly enough, or handled it well enough. The solution, I thought, was always improvement.
Do it better.
Do it more completely.
Do it with fewer loose ends.
What I’m starting to understand now is that many of the things draining me were never neutral. They just weren’t named as work.
Explanation is work.
Monitoring other people’s reactions is work.
Pre-emptively adjusting timing, wording, or approach is work.
Staying available longer than is sustainable is work.
None of this shows up on a task list. None of it is acknowledged as labor. But it costs real energy, and it accumulates quietly.
For years, I believed the answer was to do these things better. More carefully. More thoroughly. I didn’t question whether they were necessary. I only questioned my ability to carry them.
That’s what has shifted.
I haven’t stopped paying these costs yet. I still explain when I don’t want to. I still step in when I can see a problem forming. I still absorb discomfort that doesn’t fully belong to me.
But I no longer confuse that with obligation.
And I’m learning, slowly, to let that go.
To tell the difference between what is actually mine to carry and what I’ve simply been practiced at carrying.
When energy leaves me now, I notice it. I’m learning to recognize when something is asking for labor without offering anything in return. I can feel the difference between effort that leads somewhere and effort that only keeps things from falling apart.
That awareness doesn’t stop the transaction immediately. But it changes how it lands.
I don’t walk away assuming there is something wrong with me.
I don’t leave interactions wondering what I failed to do.
I don’t automatically treat depletion as evidence that I mismanaged myself.
I’m understanding what just happened.
That understanding isn’t a boundary yet. It comes earlier than that. It’s a foothold.
It’s the point where responsibility stops being invisible. Where exhaustion stops being moralized and starts being interpreted accurately. Where cost becomes legible instead of personal.
I’m not finished withdrawing my energy. I’m not practiced yet at keeping it with me. Some patterns are older than awareness, and they don’t dissolve just because I can name them.
But I am no longer unconscious of where my energy goes.
And that alone has begun to change things.
Not by making me harder or stricter, but by making me clearer about what I’m paying for, what I’m still learning to step back from, and what I’m no longer willing to keep calling free.
