This week I got hit with a virus. I knew something was off the night before when I was asleep by six in the evening. The kind of sick where it feels like the life has been sucked out of you. The next morning I was standing in the bedroom, trying to make the bed, and found myself breathing heavily. I couldn’t even pick up the decorative pillows that get thrown onto the floor every night before we go to sleep. But Lettie is in full toddler mode, and the apartment still needs to run whether I feel well or not. So I did what I always do. I kept going. Picking things up around the house, watching Lettie in the morning, trying to make sure Andrea didn’t need to do even more than she was already doing. I pushed through it because that felt like the only option available to me.
I was overexerting myself and I knew it. My body was telling me to stop and I kept going anyway. And the truth is, it wasn’t just the virus. I’ve been carrying a lot. Work has been intense. On the side, I’ve been pulling out more and more. Advisory work, the Discord community, writing here, and now the Pokemon card business I’m trying to build from scratch. I’m doing all of it because I have to provide. That’s how I’ve always thought about it. You do whatever you can, because that’s the job.
And through all of it, I keep coming back to the same thing. I don’t ask for help. I am fiercely independent. I don’t like relying on people, even the people closest to me. I think there are two sides to it, and they reinforce each other in a way that makes the pattern really hard to break.
The first is that I genuinely feel like I can’t. When I look at Andrea, who is exhausted and carrying just as much as I am, the thought of saying I need a hand feels selfish. When the work keeps piling up and I know there’s more to build, the thought of slowing down feels irresponsible. The circumstances always seem to justify keeping going. Someone else is more tired. Someone else has more on their plate. So I absorb it.
The second is what happens over time when you keep absorbing. The weight doesn’t disappear just because you’ve gotten used to carrying it. It accumulates quietly, in your shoulders, in your sleep, in the shorter fuse you didn’t realize you had. I’ve written before about resilience being a double-edged sword, and I meant it then. But this week it hit differently. It’s one thing to understand the concept. It’s another to be lying in bed at two in the afternoon on a Thursday, unable to get up, knowing you made it worse by not stopping sooner.
This week my body made the decision for me. I hit a wall where pushing through wasn’t even an option anymore. And in that moment, lying in bed, I started thinking about what it actually means to reclaim your time. Not in some productivity sense, but in the most basic sense. Recognizing the moment when you’ve crossed from determination into stubbornness. Giving yourself permission to go a bit further, because that’s who you are, and then pulling back. Not because you want to. Because the alternative doesn’t serve anyone. Not Andrea, not Lettie, not the work, not the things I’m building on the side.
I think for people like me, people who are wired to keep going and keep providing, the hardest lesson is that your body is talking to you all the time. It’s telling you when enough is enough. And the question isn’t whether you hear it. The question is whether you’re willing to listen.
There was no big moment where it all clicked. The virus ran its course. I got better. But I came out of it knowing something I didn’t let myself know before. That I can’t keep going like this without something giving. And that maybe the first thing to give should be the idea that I have to do it all alone.
Pouring from a drained cup helps no one. Great read, Max.