This One Doesn't Quiet
Why succeeding doesn’t feel like a win when a voice inside says you haven’t earned it
She closed a deal that morning. Two hundred percent of what her client would have settled for otherwise. Her co-counsel hadn’t expected anything close to it. Her son told her she should be proud.
She felt nothing.
What she kept circling instead was a small thing that hadn’t gone her way earlier that same morning. An itty-bitty thing, she called it. She came to the Friday call carrying it, four days into a headache her doctor had already told her wasn’t medical. Relax, the doctor had said. And every time she booked an appointment for it, it was gone by the time she arrived.
We started with the headache, because that was what was in front of her. Underneath it was the older thing: a voice she has known her whole life, one that arrives precisely when something goes well.
What looks like sabotage is usually trying to protect you. Ask it directly and it will often say so, and welcoming it is enough to let it settle. That is the suggestion I offer most, because most of the time it is true.
Not this time.
She had already asked it. “You’re trying to protect me. Tell me what.”
“I don’t want you to get too confident and screw this up.”
She pushed back. “In doing what you’re doing, I am screwing up. I’m too tired.” It seemed to understand. It didn’t back off.
I said I still suspected some kind of protection in it, even in disguise. She wasn’t having it. “I think it’s trying to sabotage me. It wants me to fail.” She had already put the question to it plainly, are you trying to get me to fail, or to help me, and it had answered without softening it. “I’m trying to get you to fail.”
It didn’t even feel like her, she said.
I kept offering the same door. Maybe even the failure is a kind of protection. Maybe this is love, in some crazy shape, trying to save you. Welcome it with love and it tends to quiet.
“No. This one doesn’t quiet.”
She wasn’t refusing the practice. She was doing it more faithfully than most people ever manage. Every hour, a twenty-minute break. She would sit down and turn toward it. “I’m here. I’m listening. Tell me what you have to say.” Nothing. She had gone back into the childhood rooms it pointed to and found them empty. Whatever it was, it was manufacturing. And the more attention she gave it, the more rigid it grew.
So I stopped trying to move it.
Could you let all of it be as it is, just for now. She could. Then: are you those sensations, or are you aware of them?
“I’m aware of them.”
Is the awareness bothered, either way, by the sensations?
“The awareness is not bothered by the sensation.” And then: “the sensation is bothered that the awareness is aware of it.”
There was nothing to argue with there. Awareness is always aware: it is the ground everything else is noticed against. She didn’t have to win against the voice. She only had to see that the part of her registering it had never been in the fight.
The voice did not quiet. I want to be honest about that, because she was. Some things stay stuck a long while. They don’t dissolve on command, or inside a year, or inside whatever block of time we would prefer. What changes first is not the noise. It is where you are standing while it happens.
She had already found the standing place without naming it: the rests, the sitting down, the listening. Not to fix the voice. To rest as the thing it was never able to disturb.