There was a morning, not long ago, when I woke up already really tired.
Not the usual kind of tired from too much on. It was heavier, lower. Like something in me had been trying to get my attention for a long time… and I’d been pretending not to hear it.
I sat at my desk with my coffee, watching the steam rise and disappear.
My laptop glowed back at me.
Emails waited.
Messages alerts went off.
Tasks lined up.
And yet… nothing in me moved.
It was as if my body had quietly slipped into neutral, but my mind hadn’t caught up to the truth. I felt disaffected, restless, almost hollow, but still trying to convince myself I just needed to “push through.” That old instinct to keep performing was strong. Familiar?
I told myself I was fine.
I’ve told myself that many times.
But the body doesn’t negotiate.
It knows before the mind.
Later that week, something happened, not dramatic, not catastrophic, but enough to shake me. I stepped off a curb near home and nearly stepped into an incoming bike. My whole system jolted awake. My heart raced.
It wasn’t the near miss that jolted me.
It was the sense that life had tapped me on the shoulder.
Like it was saying, “Are you paying attention yet?”
Because I hadn’t been.
Not really.
For weeks, I’d been powering through exhaustion, overriding signals, pushing away a knowing I didn’t want to name. Feeling off-course, but too busy to stop and question why.
At some point, that becomes habit.
We become experts at tuning out what hurts.
Just carrying on.
Ignoring the whispers.
And then life, in its perfect wisdom, raises its voice.
Through illness. Or burnout. Or a moment that startles us awake.
These moments aren’t random. I seem them as intelligence.
Signals from the deeper part of us that refuses to be continually silenced .
When I sat with it, I realised the exhaustion wasn’t just physical.
It was emotional.
Maybe you’ve felt that too. That uneasy edge where the role you’ve mastered no longer fits, but you keep wearing it anyway, because it’s familiar… because you’ve always been good at it… because it’s easier than admitting you’re longing for something more aligned, more alive.
There’s a moment, in every meaningful pivot, where the body speaks before the mind is ready.
It shows us the truth we’re not yet willing to say out loud.
And maybe the signs you’ve been feeling lately - the heaviness, the disconnection, the sudden flashes of irritability or fatigue - aren’t failures at all.
Maybe hints of direction: the early language of your next chapter trying to rise.
I’ve come to trust these signals.
They’re rarely wrong.
I see the invitations wrapped inside discomfort.
The question it evokes is:
“What is this moment trying to show me about the life I’m meant to grow into?”
If you’ve been noticing your own signals, even the subtle ones, I encourage you to pause with presence.
A quiet moment to listen to what your life is asking of you now.
Because sometimes the pivot begins long before the change.
It begins the moment you stop ignoring what’s been whispering inside you for years.
Just to add, if a part of you has been feeling “off,” it doesn’t mean you’re losing your edge. It means something in you is ready to evolve.
Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash