Radical Self-Honesty
or: When Slowing Down Feels Like Falling Behind
This is me thinking out loud. If you’re here, thank you for sitting with it.
Lately, the question I ask myself most often isn’t philosophical.
It’s operational.
Am I falling behind… or is this my wake-up call to finally slow down?
I don’t ask it casually.
I ask it because my body has been unreliable for years now.
Dizzy. Fatigued. Foggy.
Three years. Thirty-seven doctors. No diagnosis.
I ask it because so many of the things I was once certain about no longer hold.
About health.
About aging.
About the future.
About how life was supposed to unfold.
Slowing down used to feel like a choice.
Now it feels imposed.
That changes the math.
Christmas, Apparently
This all came into sharp focus at Christmas.
One day, I realized—too late, obviously—that Christmas was a full week closer than I thought.
Panic.
Suddenly I was baking. Cooking. Planning. Doing.
Cookies. So many cookies.
If you had looked at my Facebook page that week, you would have assumed a hoard of people were arriving on Christmas morning. Possibly with luggage.
Festive abundance.
Traditions upheld.
Competence on full display.
In reality:
Me.
My partner.
My son.
One good friend.
Four people.
One table.
No choir.
Yet I behaved as if I were hosting a lifestyle tribunal.
As if someone would arrive with a clipboard.
As if Christmas morning came with performance reviews.
My freezer is now filled with uneaten, slightly stale Christmas cookies.
Evidence.
Of expectations no one placed on me.
Of standards no one asked for.
Of pressure I generated entirely on my own.
The Pressure Wasn’t the Holiday
I wasn’t responding to Christmas.
I was responding to an internal script.
The Hallmark version.
The inherited version.
The version that once proved I was doing life correctly.
And I exhausted myself trying to recreate it for an audience that did not exist.
That’s when I saw it clearly:
This wasn’t about Christmas.
This is the pressure I live with every day.
Radical vs. Brutal Honesty
For most of my life, momentum validated me.
Deadlines created clarity.
Work proved worth.
I didn’t ask why I was moving.
I just moved.
The system rewarded that version of me.
Until it didn’t.
What I’m learning—slowly, imperfectly—is that radical self-honesty is not the same thing as brutal honesty.
Brutal honesty is often honesty with force behind it.
Truth as performance.
Truth with casualties.
You wanted me to be honest, people say—
as if honesty requires damage to count.
Radical self-honesty is quieter.
It doesn’t start with other people.
It doesn’t announce itself.
It doesn’t need witnesses.
It’s the daily decision to stop lying to myself in order to preserve an identity.
The Truth I’m Sitting With
Here it is:
I still tolerate intense internal pressure not because it’s required,
but because it validates the old version of me.
The capable one.
The fast one.
The one who could do it all.
That pressure reassures who I was.
And exhausts who I am.
The stress.
The drive.
The urgency I once admired.
It used to make me successful.
Now it’s the protagonist.
A Different Question
Slowing down doesn’t just threaten productivity.
It threatens the story I’ve told about myself.
If I’m not moving, am I disappearing?
If I’m resting, am I opting out?
So I’m asking a different question now:
What am I capable of today
without borrowing energy from tomorrow?
That’s not giving up.
That’s accuracy.
I don’t have this figured out.
I’ve stopped pretending that I do.
The brave, unstoppable version of me isn’t gone.
She’s just not in charge anymore.
I’m choosing accuracy over aspiration.
Listening instead of overriding.
Letting this no longer works be enough information.
Well then…here we are.
XO,
Ria
About this space: This is where I think out loud and stay present. No conclusions. No advice. Just attention.