As I’ve been sitting with this idea of awareness becoming a distraction, I started noticing a pattern that feels familiar, and honestly, a little uncomfortable to admit.
When I discover something about myself, I tend to immediately move into figuring it out. Learning about it. Naming it. Finding the right language or framework to understand it better. Awareness, for me, often turns into a mental project.
A recent example of this showed up around my attachment style.
I’ve come to understand that I have avoidant attachment tendencies. That awareness didn’t arrive out of nowhere, it’s something I’ve been circling for a long time, and my sister has actually been one of the first people to help me see it clearly. She’s been a mirror for me in that way.
But instead of sitting with what that meant, I did what I often do. I went looking for explanations. Books. Language. Somewhere to put it. This is what I often do. I have a huge library of self development, energetic, physics, spiritual books because I feel I need to understand something completely before integrating it.
Recently, two activities collided into a dramatic recognition. I read the book "Sociopath" by Patric Gagne. It's a memoir about her life as a sociopath. And I was watching Tell Me Lies on Hulu, a show where almost every main character is deeply manipulative, emotionally detached, and honestly kind of terrifying. And somewhere in the middle of that, a thought crossed my mind: What if I’m a sociopath?
I detach from people easily when I feel hurt. I can cut ties and not look back. I keep people at arm’s length to protect myself. And suddenly, instead of sitting with avoidant attachment, my mind jumped to something much more extreme.
I even said it out loud to my sister. Her response was a very thoughtful, very unsettling: “Hmm… it’s possible.”
That sent me spiraling a bit. I even started constructing a whole theory: empath to deeply hurt person to avoidant attachment to sociopath. It felt oddly convincing for a moment, like I was finally explaining myself in a way that made everything make sense.
But then I talked to my best friend.
She didn’t entertain it. She didn’t analyze it. She just said, very plainly, that there was absolutely no way I was a sociopath. And for the first time in this whole process (years long BTW), I stopped trying to figure it out and actually checked in with myself.
Trying on the label of sociopath didn’t feel true in my body. It didn’t resonate. It felt dramatic, distancing, and ultimately wrong.
And that’s when something interesting happened.
When I held that next to the truth of avoidant attachment, without books, without theories, without escalation, the avoidant attachment suddenly made sense. Not as a flaw to fix, but as a pattern I could recognize in real moments. In real relationships. In real behaviors.
I could see examples. I could feel it. I could accept it.
It took moving toward something I perceived as worse for me to finally stop and let the original awareness land.
That’s the pattern I’m noticing now. Awareness becomes uncomfortable, so I either intellectualize it or exaggerate it, anything to avoid sitting quietly with what’s actually true. Awareness doesn’t get to settle until I stop trying to turn it into a story.
What I’m practicing today is letting awareness be what it is, not a diagnosis, not a problem, not an identity, just information about how I’ve learned to move through the world.
There’s relief in that. And a surprising amount of self-compassion.
Today’s prompt:
Where do I move past a simple truth about myself and into a bigger story, instead of letting the original awareness be enough?
I’m not trying to resolve that today.
I’m just noticing when I do it.