“I didn’t notice when I picked it back up. Only that I was carrying it again.”

There was a point in March where I realized I wasn’t just thinking about control anymore—I was carrying it. It didn’t show up all at once. It came in small ways. Conversations that stayed with me longer than they should have. Decisions that didn’t feel settled, even after they were made. A quiet sense that I was responsible for how things turned out. From the outside, everything still looked fine. Things were moving. But underneath, something felt heavier than it had in February. Like I had picked something back up without noticing… and now I was the one holding it together again.

It showed up one evening after I left a house where the appointment never happened. I was already twenty minutes down the road when my phone rang. They had shown up late. Now they wanted me to turn around and go back. It had been a long week—the kind where everything keeps moving and you don’t really stop. I felt the frustration before the conversation even settled. The ask wasn’t unreasonable. But it didn’t feel that way. It felt like more. More time. More energy. More weight. I told them I wasn’t going back. They could reschedule it. I didn’t care how it landed.

It wasn’t the situation that bothered me. It was how quickly I shut it down. No space. No pause. Just a line drawn and held. I told myself it was because I was tired. Because it had been a long week. And maybe that was part of it. But it wasn’t all of it. There was something in me that needed to stay in control of how the night went—what I gave, what I didn’t. Like if I let that slip, even a little, something else would start to come undone.

It didn’t stop there. That same edge showed up in other places. In conversations that felt shorter than they needed to be. In moments where I had already decided how things were going to go before they even started. In the way I carried the day with me, even after it was over. And somewhere in the middle of it, I could feel the momentum I had been riding since January start to stall. It wasn’t sudden. Just subtle enough to notice. And instead of letting it be what it was, I tightened. Like if I held things together a little more, I could keep it from slipping. It wasn’t loud. It wasn’t obvious. But it was consistent. A steady pressure to keep things in place. To manage outcomes. To stay ahead of anything that might slip. And the more I paid attention to it, the harder it was to ignore what it was doing to me.

It was exhausting in a way that didn’t make sense at first. Not physical. Something else. Like I never really stepped out of the day, even when it was over. My mind stayed in it—replaying, adjusting, trying to get ahead of things that hadn’t even happened yet. There wasn’t much room left. Not for stillness. Not for anything outside of what I was trying to manage. And the more I held onto it, the more it felt like everything depended on me keeping it that way.

There were moments in it where something didn’t sit right. Not loud. Not enough to stop me. Just a quiet sense that I was doing more than I needed to. Like I was holding things that weren’t mine to carry, but I kept holding them anyway. I could feel the difference in those moments—between forcing things to stay in place… and something that didn’t need that from me. But I didn’t follow it. I stayed with what I could manage. What I could control. Even when it felt heavier than it should have.

By the end of the month, it was harder to ignore. Not just the way I was responding to things, but what it was pointing to underneath. I could see how quickly I stepped in to carry what didn’t belong to me. How natural it felt to keep everything moving, even when it came at a cost. There was a part of me that knew it didn’t have to be that way. That I didn’t have to hold it all together. But knowing that and living it weren’t the same. And somewhere in the middle of that tension… I stayed.