Productivity as a Panic Response

“Work is the refuge of people who have nothing better to do.” — Oscar Wilde

I didn’t choose responsibility.
I inherited it.
Like a debt no one warned me about.

They needed a steady one.
So I became gravity.
Not out of love. Out of pattern.

Even now, I triple-check the locks
before asking myself if I even wanted the door open.

People say they admire how I hold it all.
They don’t notice I never put it down.
Not even in sleep.

I wake up bracing for alarms
that haven’t gone off in years.
Still can’t rest.

There’s a version of me
that could walk away from the wreck
and not rebuild it out of guilt.

I haven’t met them yet.
But I’m starting to look.

“People who over-function don’t always want praise. Sometimes they’re just terrified no one else will show up if they stop.”

Some people never got to learn ease. They were handed responsibility before they had language for resentment. The work became an identity. Not because it felt good, but because being needed felt safer than being forgotten.

Over-functioning isn’t always about control. Sometimes it’s fear, rehearsed into muscle memory. The fear that no one else is tracking the details. The fear that stillness will cost you everything you held together by anticipation.

Praise gets confusing when your body associates love with effort. Eventually, approval starts to feel like pressure. And you can’t tell the difference between being seen and being used.

There’s nothing admirable about depletion. There’s just adaptation. A quiet kind of sacrifice that keeps its receipts in the form of exhaustion, shortness of breath, and that ache behind the eyes you never mention to anyone.

You’re not selfish for letting go of a role you didn’t audition for. You’re not broken if you feel guilt when you try to rest. This is how the nervous system tries to keep you safe. But survival isn’t the same as peace.

There’s a difference between showing up out of care and showing up because absence would destroy you. One is love. The other is compulsion. Both look similar from the outside. But only one lets you sleep through the night.

I’ve poured everything into this. Healing Thoughts II: 33 Poems and Meditations for Emotional Renewal is up for preorder now. Release date: October 1. These pages carry the deepest, sharpest work I’ve done, and I can’t wait for them to be in your hands.

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