If I Pause, I Disappear

I’ve finally figured out the core belief system I’ve been operating with for basically all of my life. Here’s what I believe: if I slow down, rest, integrate, I will be abandoned. I will lose opportunities. People. I am not interesting, smart, pretty, good enough for anyone to stay on their own, just because I’m Me. Just Me is absolutely not good enough for anything good to come my way, and stay.

If I rest, good things will disappear. If I don’t respond immediately to a text, an opportunity, it will slip away because it didn’t rightfully belong to me in the first place. If I don’t prove my worth, if I sit within myself and allow life to flow, I panic. I feel the need to grip so tightly to the possibilities life brings my way, because if I don’t show immediate interest, they will disappear.

Ultimately this is my belief: If I stop performing, and I am not chosen, then it confirms what I’ve always feared- that I was never enough to stay.

Part of me learned very early that being myself didn’t keep me. Being quiet didn’t keep me. Being needy didn’t keep me. Slowing down didn’t keep me.

So I’ll stay alert. I’ll stay useful. I’ll stay impressive. I’ll stay necessary. I believed that what’s meant for me will only stay if I work hard enough, fast enough, and well enough. This belief assumes that love is fragile. Opportunity is scarce. I am replaceable. I must earn staying power.

This was a brilliant adaptation. A survival strategy born in a time of chaos and trauma and dysregulation.

Now when I try to tell myself, “I am enough even when I pause,” my nervous system doesn’t hear reassurance. It hears: “We’re about to stop doing the thing that kept us from being abandoned.”

Somewhere in my body, the rules are simple:

Pause = disappearance.

Rest = irrelevance.

Needs = rejection.

Being real = being left.

So the thought of not over-functioning- not holding the emotional labor for both people in a relationship, not proving myself- makes my nervous system feel like I’m about to walk into traffic.

I’m fucking exhausted. Living this way for decades has been exhausting. I’ve always been “on.” Always working, proving, scanning for the change in people and opportunities- when will the other shoe drop? When will they leave? When will they realize I’m actually not worth what they thought I was? It’s so ingrained in me that my whole body freaks out at the thought of choosing a different way of existing.

This part of me, this reflex that says, “I am not enough unless I’m ‘on,’ proving, hustling, pleasing,” is not my truth.

It is my protector.

Built through repeated experience. Loss. Inconsistency. Having to be “on” to survive.

This anxious part of me is not my enemy. It kept me functioning, surviving, showing up, loving, building a life. I won’t exile it; I thank it. And now I am showing it that the world I’m in now is not the one that needed this way of life. This rewiring is progress.

My brain is starting to understand something that my body doesn’t trust yet: I. Am. Worthy.

I am worthy of goodness. Love. Opportunity. Success. Ease. Comfort. Rest.

Anything that requires me to abandoned myself to keep it was never safe to begin with.

Healing doesn’t have to take effort. It doesn’t have to be fast to be effective. It just has to be honest. For me, it does not work to tell myself things like,

“What’s meant for me will stay.”

“I am enough.”

Yeah, no. I guarantee you, nothing will stay, ever, my core belief says.

So I can’t just rip out this old belief. I can’t just rip the armor off. I have to add safety alongside it. I have to teach my body that it doesn’t have to wear the armor all the time anymore. I’m working on just a 10% Rule. I respond a little slower. I explain a little less. I let silence exist. I rest without justifying it. And then I watch to see if anything catastrophic happens. And so far, I’m happy to report, there have been no catastrophies. Unbelievable, I know.

This is how my body learns- through experience, not logic.

Healing doesn’t begin when fear disappears. It begins when fear is seen and no longer obeyed automatically.

I am learning to trust that I am enough even when I pause. Even when I rest. That’s not laziness. That’s not complacency. That’s Reclamation. My brain knows that I don’t lose aligned things by resting. I lose them by abandoning myself to keep them. My heart still freaks out at the thought of resting. But I am practicing resting without guilt. I am practicing riding an emotional low and letting that wave pass.

Aligned love doesn’t evaporate because I take a breath. Aligned work doesn’t vanish because I pause. Aligned opportunity doesn’t require panic.

What does disappear when I slow down is misalignment. False urgency. People who need me to perform for their comfort. Systems that feed on my over-functioning.

That’s not loss. That’s clarity.

I have lived my life as if everything good could disappear at any moment. I don’t yet believe that I’m worthy of love when I rest. Just because I exist. What I actually fear is that if I stop performing, nothing will reach for me.

I’m beginning to notice how much it costs me to live as if rest makes me unlovable.

Maybe awareness is enough for now.