It's Time to Call Off the Inner Fight

 

Photo by Anima Visual on Unsplash

Oh, so this is how it’s going to be.

That was the thought I had when I rolled over and saw the clock. 1:26 am. For some people, I think that still counts as night, a time they see before they go to bed. I’d been asleep for a few hours, and my brain had decided it was time to dredge up all the unresolved bits and baubles from the previous day because 1:26 am is a perfect time for those things to demand attention, right?

There’s something existential about waking up that early in the morning / late at night, where low, persistent pressure isn’t quite loud enough to cause full-on panic but it still can’t be ignored. My heart rate told me what I suspected the moment my eyes popped open: sleep was going to lose this argument. So, I got up, grabbed my phone, and went downstairs to the couch where I spend approximately 57% of my early mornings, telling myself that the colder air and firmer back support will somehow reset things even though my experience tells me otherwise.

I checked my email, which is never a good idea when the sun’s not shining, scrolled through LinkedIn without really seeing anything, until my mind had backed away from the edge of panic enough that stretching out under a blanket and drifting back into something that resembled rest was possible.

5:12 am still came too early.

That’s how the routine unfolds so many nights, which is part of the problem. After the fitful night of “sleep,” I laid out my running gear on the kitchen counter, filled up a small water bladder, and stood there long enough to know I wasn’t going to follow through with the run. Instead, I settled on a slow walk on the treadmill while half-watching an episode of Castle, which is less about entertainment, honestly, and more about occupying space and time until my day “actually begins.”

There’s nothing especially dramatic about any of this. That’s what makes it easy-ish to dismiss. If you take it all together, it points to something that’s been building for a while. Over the past year or so, especially while writing more than I ever have before, I’ve had to admit something about myself to myself that I used to frame as a strength without ever questioning or counting the cost.

I tend to be a person who carries things whenever they are left unattended. If there’s a gap, I step into it. I absorb ambiguity like an infant’s diaper attempting to contain as much as it can. It’s the same with responsibility. If it hasn’t landed clearly somewhere else, I tend to assume it’s mine. This has been true in work, in relationships, and in all those little spaces where no one is making explicit assignments but something still feels disquieted.

There are environments where that tendency is useful, at least in the short term, because things move forward and problems get handled. There’s also a point, however, where it stops being a contribution and starts becoming a pattern that your body will keep track of even if you self-select ignoring the problem. In the last sixteen months, I’ve gained nearly forty pounds, and while it would be easy to attribute that to diet and schedule and any number of other surface-level explanations, those aren’t complete on their own because they describe the outcome without addressing the underlying dynamic. The more accurate description is that I have been living in a way that keeps me consistently activated, carrying more inputs, more decisions, and more responsibility than I have any realistic way of processing cleanly, and eventually that shows up somewhere whether you like it, want it, or not.

I’ve been reading Building A Non-Anxious Life by Dr. John Delony, and one idea in particular has stuck with me because of the way it frames what I’ve spent a long time trying to figure out on my own: the claim that anxiety itself is not the problem but rather the signal that something underneath it is way off.

For me, there’s nothing subtle about the shift in that idea, and it changes the direction of the conversation in a way that makes a lot of my usual responses feel misapplied, maybe, because if anxiety is functioning as an alarm, then trying to suppress it without addressing what it’s pointing to becomes an endless loop.

What I really like about Delony’s book is that it doesn’t present a clean, idealized version of a life without any tension. In the opening it even acknowledges that the phrase “non-anxious” is more about direction than volume. I find that oddly grounding because it removes the expectation that there is a final state to arrive at and replaces it with the idea that there are choices that either increase or decrease the baseline level of friction you live with everyday.

What’s been harder to reconcile is the implication that many of the ways I respond to that friction are not neutral, even when they feel justified in the moment. Caffeine, for example, makes it easier to keep going, but it also keeps the system on high alert. It’s kind of like trying to use gas to put out a fire. Similarly, multiple screens make it possible to juggle more at once, but they fragment attention in a way that makes resolution impossible.

Pushing into areas where I’m less effective gives me the sense that I’m expanding my capability, but it often comes at the expense of using the areas where I already create leverage.

Like the drama-less state of my sleepless nights, there’s nothing independently significant about those decisions, yet together they create an environment where the internal siren never shuts off. Over time, the responses to that siren start to harden into habits that are really about managing the discomfort it produces while simultaneously ignoring the underlying issue.

There’s a passage in Delony’s book about people gradually becoming accustomed to the very alarms they are trying to quiet, and that observation hits different once you start looking at your own patterns through that lens. It suggests that the goal isn’t to just eliminate anxiety but to understand what conditions you have built that keep generating it in the first place.

When I look at my own life honestly, it gets difficult to argue that the anxiety I experience is disconnected from the way I’ve structured my days, my work, and my sense of responsibility. It’s less an intrusion and more a reflection, which is not a comfortable conclusion but, hey, at least it’s a useful one.

For a long time, my default response has been to treat that reflection as something I can overcome through effort. That works well enough in the short term to reinforce the approach but doesn’t hold water over longer stretches because it never reduces the underlying load. It just redistributes it across more hours, more tasks, and more mental overhead until it eventually surfaces in ways that are hard to ignore: disrupted sleep, physical changes, or a persistent sense that something’s off even when nothing is obviously wrong. At that point, continuing to push in the same direction starts to look a lot like avoidance because it delays the need to examine what I’m actually carrying and why.

It’s time to call off the inner fight. As my Director of Operations likes to remind me—she even got me a shirt—”get someone else to do it.”

Calling off that inner fight, at least as I’m starting to finally understand it, is about changing my relationship to the fight so that it becomes a source of information rather than something to suppress through more effort. It’s easy enough to describe that change but really hard to implement, because it requires looking directly at the systems and structures that I built and deciding which ones are actually necessary and which ones persist out of habit or misplaced obligation.

In my case, that includes acknowledging that not ever problem needs to be mine. My role isn’t to be the point through which everything in my business or my life flows. There are people and systems around me that are capable of carrying more than I sometimes allow. That’s a bitter realization pill to swallow.

That acknowledgement also includes making smaller, less visible adjustments that impact the baseline of my daily life, such as reducing inputs, creating space for focused thinking, and allowing periods of rest to exist without needing to be justified by prior exhaustion.

Delony’s paints this great analogy that’s been in my head since I read it. It captures something easy to miss when you stay in analysis mode too long. There’s this difference between understanding a problem and addressing it. It’s possible to spend a lot of time naming, categorizing, and discussing the nature of anxiety without making any changes that would reduce it. I’ve spent enough time in that space to recognize it when I see it.

The alternative is about action at a scale that feels underwhelming, which is probably why it’s easier to overlook (or actively ignore). Turning off an extra screen (which I did), handing off a responsibility that doesn’t need to be mine (I have 29 employees to choose from), choosing not to reach for something that keeps the system elevated (Goodbye Diet Dr. Pepper. You’ve been a good friend.), and creating space where there was previously constant input don’t present themselves as major interventions, but they do alter the environment in ways that accumulate over time.

I don’t think there’s a version of life where that siren-signal disappears entirely. I’m not convinced that it should. I am starting to see that there’s a difference between living in a constant state of internal resistance and allowing that signal to guide adjustments that make the overall system better and more sustainable.

If there’s a change to be made here, it’s probably not going to be a dramatic swing from one state to another. It’ll probably be a slow, gradual unwinding of the assumption that everything needs to be carried and managed through effort or force. Again, the assumption’s been useful enough to get me where I am, which is part of what makes it so hard to question, yet it’s also the thing that, left unchecked, continues to produce the tension I’ve been trying to eliminate.

So, calling off the inner fight is alignment, not surrender, which is a less visible process that unfolds in decisions that are easy to dismiss individually but meaningful when they change the overall pattern.

To be clear, I’m not there yet, but I can see the direction a bit more clearly than I could before, and that alone feels like a better place to stand than continuing to push against something that was never meant to be fought or carried in the first place.

How Full Is Your Soul?

 

Photo by 愚木混株 Yumu on Unsplash

Mariah Carey’s Always Be My Baby was just audible over the constant buzz of dozens of conversations blending together in the Salt Lake City International Airport’s A terminal.

“Did you see that couch on Facebook Marketplace…
Your mother’s been in the bathroom a long…
Why does an airport coffee cost…
I didn’t realize those were so…
Why don’t they load the plane from the back to…”

As I walked through the terminal, each sentence started with the purpose of communicating something but trailed off as the end was drowned out by something new hitting my ears. The voices overlapped with chaotic, layered disresolve, like pieces of different lives intersecting, just for a moment, before continuing on their individual trajectories. Travelers, moving through the terminal in a steady, uninterrupted current, each one headed somewhere specific even if the reason behind the movement or the moment felt less defined than wherever they were going.

Some were likely on their way to see a family member in a city that still felt like home even after twenty years away. Maybe others were chasing something a bit more abstract like meeting with investors that might validate (with money) an idea that had lived too long in the crowded spaces of their mind. It might have been the obligation to attend the fifth trade show that year blurred into the previous four.

Maybe they were going home.

Everyone was going somewhere with their digital boarding pass in hand, seat assignment waiting, yet it was hard to ignore the sense that fewer people could say in words what they were looking for, really, once they arrived.

That idea settled in my mind as I walked the 1km length of the “A” terminal. It wasn’t a philosophical conversation with myself. I save those for my long runs. This came because of a decision I had to make that refuses to rest calmly in my mind.

We had to realign some things with our team, which meant ending a few agreements earlier than expected with people who were capable developers and individuals I genuinely liked and respected. They are the kind of people you hope to work with for a long time. Their situation, however, was reasonable: time split between two companies and competing priorities that made full commitment to our team unrealistic. What I needed, and what our business requires right now, was a level of focus they couldn’t give consistently, and so the decision, well outlined on my sticky notes, carried a heaviness that didn’t dissipate once it was made.

I’m relatively new at being “the big boss.” I believe I handled it in the right way, or at least as close to “right” as these situations allow, without burning any bridges or exchanging harsh words. We parted on terms that preserved the personal relationship, I think, even as the work arrangement ended. It still hurt more than I expected. For me, it felt like something with real potential was interrupted before it could reach its natural conclusion. After everything was done, the team lead sent me a message that prompted this missive: “I don’t feel in the right to be happy, you know.”

Her thought stopped me. It was simple, honest, and familiar. I’ve sat with the same feeling many times in the last year and a half. Most of the time in business, we over-edit our emotions before we express them. Thankfully, she didn’t

This is another theme that’s recurred in recent years: where something settles outside long before you find internal resolution. The decision is made and there’s a seemingly clear path forward, but part of you still lingers behind, still trying to catch up to what just happened. Relief might be there, but maybe it’s fragmented; broken up by periods of regret. Relief and regret can share the same space as we remember what we had to let go or leave behind. Unfortunately, those two things can remain at odds for an uncomfortable amount of time. It is the real sense that you’re carrying more than one truth at the same time, even when the world around you moves on, blissfully ignorant that nothing is resolved.

It’s a bit weird to me that the unresolved tension of that decision reminded me of a scene from Home, where Oh is trying to attract the attention of the Gorg ship. Gratuity “Tip” Tucci uses the mirror she’d given to her mom to signal the Gorg Commander and point out Oh’s location before he’s crushed. The ship’s massive “claw” descends on Oh’s location while the sound fades away. For a minute, time stops for Tip; an outcome already decided. Then there’s the simple, absurd-sounding backup beep as the claw lifts. Oh emerges completely unscathed (except for the possibility of a number three). Tip, tears streaming down her face, runs to him, pulls him into a crushing embrace, and then immediately hits him, her reaction shifting from absolute relief to frustration in a way that feels so real. (I’m not ashamed to admit I’ve cried along with that part more than once.)

That moment captures something I think we all recognize but most can’t really describe. It’s when two fully formed emotions occupy the same space. They neither cancel each other out nor wait their turn to be felt. Life’s like that sometimes.

There are other times, however, where emotions aren’t additive because one overpowering emotion consumes all available space, leaving no room for distraction or background processing.

The day my mom died, the day I married my best friend, the day each of our children came into the world, and the day I found out my wife had cancer all exist in that category. There’s not a shared emotional “tone” there, but they do share the same kind of completeness and intensity. The emotions I felt those days swallowed whole all the awareness I had. They weren’t the kind of days when I could multitask my way through or compartmentalize until later. The feelings of those moments occupied everything, leaving no room for the low-level noise and distractions that usually accompany everyday life.

Those kinds of whole-soul moments are rare, but they are unmistakable when they happen because they stand in such stark contrast to how most of life actually unfolds. Most days aren’t defined by a single, consuming emotion that changes the orbit of everything else around it; instead, they are mostly fragmented, divided across responsibilities, conversations, decisions, and tradeoffs that, by their definition, can’t resolve in the way a Hallmark movie does. You move from one thing to the next carrying pieces of each moment with you, never quite setting anything down and also not allowing any one thing to take over completely either.

The airport scene is an interesting parallel for that kind of existence, where half-hearted conversations and unfinished thoughts blend together while people move with clear destinations but not always clear reasons. Everything keeps moving, whether you’ve processed it or not. And really, we can’t process it all. There’s too much to take in. A hard decision is followed by the next obligation or a profound realization gives way to something practical that needs your attention. Even relief can get interrupted before it has time to settle into something that lasts.

In that context, the statement “I don’t feel in the right to be happy” makes sense because it feels incomplete. It doesn’t account for other things—everything—that exists alongside it. Happiness, in that moment, doesn’t show up only because the thing is resolved. Relief, loss, uncertainty, anger, and a host of other emotions can exist all at once.

We tend to associate a “full soul” with intensity, as if the most complete experiences are the ones that stand above everything else. That idea starts to fall apart, though, the longer you sit with it. A full soul isn’t reserved for extreme moments, and it isn’t built on everything lining up the way you expected. It’s what happens when you stop turning away from what’s in front of you, whether it feels settled or unresolved.

Sometimes that means not interfering with what you’re feeling. It’s simply allowing yourself to “feel the feels” as my wife likes to say. It might also be the willingness to carry something forward for a while without needing it to settle in comfortably. You can feel relief and still feel the weight of what it took to get there. You can know a decision was right and still feel the cost of it.

Even when a moment feels full-souled, you often can’t simplify things into a single feeling. Most of the time, it doesn’t come together in a way that’s easy to explain.

An airport keeps moving whether people feel ready or not. People board planes, flights leave, and no one waits for the individual passenger to make sense of it all first. Life usually works out the same way. Most people move forward without having everything sorted out.

Most of the time, that’s the only way: to keep moving forward even when some things don’t make sense.

You don’t need to understand everything or have perfect resolution before you take the first step. Fullness isn’t about having it all figured out. It’s about not pushing away parts of the experience just because they don’t fit together yet. Maybe some never will.

Most days won’t be whole-soul days. That doesn’t mean your soul is empty. It means you’re still carrying what matters.