It’s 9pm and you’re standing in your kitchen when someone in your house says something like, “You seem tired lately.”

And you laugh it off, thinking, They have no idea.

But you say something like, “Oh, I’m fine! Just busy. You know, the usual.”

Except lately, “the usual” feels like a lot.

You finish the dishes. Pack lunches for tomorrow. Check one more thing on your phone before bed.

By the time you finally lie down, you’ve almost forgotten about the comment.

Almost.

Because now the house is quiet, no one needs anything from you for the next five minutes, and you realize they weren’t wrong.

You are tired.

But it’s more than needing a good night’s sleep.

You’re tired of always feeling behind. Tired of moving from one thing that needs you to the next. Tired of getting to the end of another day and realizing you took care of almost everything except yourself.

And that's usually when the questions you don't have time for during the day start showing up.

How did I get here?

When did this become my normal?

And maybe the one that's a little harder to answer:

Where am I in all of this?

I know that particular kind of hiding.

The kind that doesn’t look like hiding at all from the outside.

It looks like responsibility.

Showing up.

Handling things.

Being fine.

And for a long time, I was really good at it.

I could keep moving, keep doing what needed to be done, keep showing up for everyone and everything in front of me.

What I wasn't very good at was stopping long enough to ask whether the life I was keeping up with still felt like mine.

For me, that question became harder to ignore in December 2020.

Which, if you're thinking excellent timing, Shannon, same.

It was a pandemic. Nothing made sense.

I didn't suddenly wake up one morning knowing exactly what I wanted or who I was supposed to become.

I just knew I had reached a point where continuing to ignore what wasn't working felt harder than admitting something needed to change.

And even then, I didn't know what that change was supposed to look like.

I think that's the part we sometimes miss when we talk about “finding ourselves” again.

It sounds like we're supposed to know who we're looking for.

Like there's some fully formed version of us waiting at the end of a very organized personal-development scavenger hunt.

If only.

Sometimes you just know the way you've been living isn't working anymore.

Nothing is dramatically wrong.

You're still doing the things.

Taking care of the people.

Keeping everything moving.

But you're doing so much responding to what life needs from you that you haven't had much room to ask what you need from your life.

And maybe that's why the question Where am I in all of this? can be so hard to answer.

You haven't disappeared.

You haven't failed at life.

You've just spent a lot of time paying attention to everything except yourself.

I don't think you need to turn that realization into another project.

Please don't go buy a new planner.

You don't need a five-step plan to “find yourself” by next Tuesday.

Maybe tonight, when the house gets quiet and nobody needs anything from you for five minutes, you let yourself notice what comes up.

What are you tired of?

What do you miss?

What have you been telling everyone is “fine” because you haven't had the time—or maybe the words—to explain that it isn't?

You don't have to know what to do with the answers yet.

For now, maybe it's enough to stop laughing them off.

Because “fine” can carry a lot.

But maybe it was never supposed to carry all of you.

Want to keep going with this conversation?
🎧 Listen to Episode 1: How I Stopped Hiding and Started Building →