Achievements Piled Over Shame
“If I were to name the thing that cost me the most time, it would be how long I tried to outrun what I was never meant to carry.” — Unknown
I’ve poured everything into this. Healing Thoughts II: 33 Poems and Meditations for Emotional Renewal is up for order now. These pages carry the deepest, sharpest work I’ve done, and I can’t wait for them to be in your hands.
I didn’t chase dreams.
I ran from stillness.
The awards came easy
once I stopped caring about rest.
Sleep was optional.
Validation wasn’t.
I polished my image
until I couldn’t remember
what I looked like without it.
People called me disciplined.
But I wasn’t.
I was afraid of what might speak
if I slowed down.
Even when I succeeded,
something kept tugging at the hem.
A small voice.
Unimpressed.
Exhausted.
Asking if any of this
would finally be enough
to quiet what never should have been silenced.
“High performers often carry old shame in plain sight. The busyness isn’t ambition, it’s avoidance with a resume.”
There’s a flavor of shame that doesn’t scream. It disguises itself in excellence. It thrives in workaholism, leadership, and applause. And when your wounds start to rot beneath a calendar full of meetings and milestones, it gets easier to pretend that drive is virtue.
For a lot of high performers, stillness isn’t just boring, it’s dangerous. There’s too much history waiting in the quiet. If your accomplishments are the only place you feel safe, the silence might expose a part of you that never got to explain why it started performing in the first place.
Avoidance wears many outfits. It’ll dress in ambition. It’ll hustle you into burnout. It’ll even convince you that your value increases with your output. But shame never actually dies under pressure. It just becomes fluent in productivity.
There’s a point where the cost of staying busy outweighs the comfort of being seen as strong. That point is an invitation. You don’t need to lose your fire. But you may need to ask what started fueling it. And what it’s been trying to bury all this time.
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