It is 11:47 PM and I am awake. Again.
Tonight’s loop is about my son’s graduation announcements that have not been ordered, and somewhere between the second and third replay, I am no longer a woman in bed at midnight. I am a bad mother. A neglectful one. The kind of mother whose son will, twenty years from now, mention offhandedly in therapy that nobody made a fuss when he graduated.
He is asleep down the hall. He is fine. The announcements are a non-issue.
But the loop does not care about facts. The loop has a job, and its job is to spin.
I have been losing sleep over things that have not happened. That is the most honest sentence I can write you this month. The trip that got canceled. The client who has not signed. The speaking gig where I do not yet know how many people will show up. The workshop I am wondering if anyone will join. My mother-in-law’s 80th birthday and whether it will feel like enough. None of it has actually gone wrong. And yet I have lived inside the going-wrong of all of it for weeks.
This is the loop. The spin our mind does when something feels uncertain — the story it builds, the meaning it assigns, the worst-case it rehearses on repeat as if rehearsal is a form of preparation. It is not. It is a tax on a future that has not even arrived.
Yes, things happen. The trip cancellation means more calls to make. A workshop with low numbers means a hit to revenue. My son’s funk is real and it tugs at every mother instinct I have. There are inconveniences. There are feelings. There are sometimes real consequences.
But that is not actually what is wrecking me.
What is wrecking me is what happens in my head about all of it. The meaning my mind assigns. The story it spins. The cost I pay emotionally for things long before they have happened — and often for things that never happen at all. The actual event is usually manageable. The story I wrap around the event is what takes me down.
My mind is programmed to protect me, so it scans for what is wrong instead of what is right. It makes someone, or some circumstance, the villain. It lives the worst-case scenario in advance, as if rehearsing the pain will somehow soften it when it arrives. It never does. It just doubles the cost. I pay once in my head for a future that may not come, and then I pay again if it does.
How many of you do the same thing? At work, at home, in the quiet moments before you fall asleep, on the drive to a meeting you have been dreading for a week?
Here is how the loop works. The mind grabs a narrative. It attaches that narrative to a label about who you are. It builds a rule around the label. The rule hardens into a belief. And the belief becomes the lived experience — long before any actual event has the chance to weigh in.
Let me show you. Back to that 11:47 PM bedroom.
My oldest is graduating from college. It’s a big deal. He hasn’t had his cap and gown photos taken. Meanwhile, I am getting graduation announcements in the mail left and right from other people whose kids are graduating. The narrative my mind hands me is: You aren’t a great mom. He won’t get the attention he deserves. He won’t feel valued. A good mom would have made sure this was done. The label that narrative bumps up against is good mom, responsible, on top of it. The rules attached say: You should have scheduled the photographer months ago. You should have taught him to handle this himself. For him to feel loved, he has to be acknowledged. He won’t be acknowledged without an announcement. The belief that drops down underneath all of it: He won’t feel celebrated. And it will be your fault.
None of it is true. He knows how to get things done. He has talked to a photographer himself. There will or won’t be announcements, and he will feel loved either way. But the mind tells me something else, and the mind is loud — especially at 11:47 PM.
Here is another one, from work, because this same loop runs everywhere. I had a speaking gig coming up. The narrative: What if no one shows up? What if I forget what I’m saying? What if the client never books me again? The label: real expert, in demand, credible. The rules: A real expert fills the room. A credible speaker never falters. If the room is small, it is a referendum on you. The belief: I am going to fail, and everyone is going to see it.
For two weeks before that gig, I lived inside the failure as if it had already happened. I rehearsed humiliation. I felt the shame of an empty room I had not yet walked into. The room turned out to be fine. The shame was free of charge.
That is what the loop does. It collects a tax on a future that has not even arrived. And even when the future does arrive with real costs attached, the loop has already charged you twice.
Our beliefs about who we are, the rules we are supposed to follow, the ways of being we hold ourselves to — almost none of it started with us. It was passed down. From mothers and grandmothers. From cultures that told women to be smaller, sweeter, more useful, less inconvenient. From a hundred small messages absorbed before we were old enough to question them. Be the good one. Hold it together. Make sure everyone else is okay first. Earn your place. Don’t be too much.
Some of those messages were love, dressed up the only way the women before us knew how to dress it. Some of them were fear, dressed up as wisdom. We inherited all of it without ever being asked.
But we — we women — get to decide what we hand down and what stops with us.
I don’t want to leave a legacy of worry. I don’t want to be remembered as the woman who ran on empty so everyone else could be full. I don’t want my children to absorb, by watching me, that love means anxiety, that motherhood means martyrdom, that being a woman means living three steps ahead of every catastrophe that probably is not coming.
I want to leave a legacy of love. The kind of love that is steady, not anxious. Present, not performing. Spacious enough to let the people I love live their own lives without me silently auditioning for an award nobody is giving out. The legacy of a woman who actually lived inside her own life, who let herself be loved back, who did not trade her one beautiful life to keep a story going that was not even hers to begin with.
That is the work. And it starts with seeing the loop. Because you cannot change a system you cannot see.
A Reader Exercise: Catch the Loop
The next time you feel that familiar tightening in your chest — the worry, the dread, the rehearsing of something that hasn’t happened yet — pause. Don’t push the feeling away. Don’t try to fix it. Just get curious.
Take out a piece of paper and walk it back through the four layers:
- The Narrative. What story is my mind telling me right now? Write it down word for word. “He won’t feel celebrated.” “No one will show up.” “She thinks I’m not enough.”
- The Label. What identity is this story protecting? Good mom. Real expert. Reliable friend. The strong one.
- The Rule. What rule does that label come with? A good mom does X. A real expert never Y. The strong one always Z.
- The Belief. What is the belief underneath all of it? Usually some version of: I’m not enough. I’m too much. I’ll be exposed. I’ll be left.
Now ask the question that changes everything: Whose voice is that, really? And is any of it actually true?
You don’t have to fix it. You don’t have to fight it. Just see it. Because the moment you can see the loop, you are no longer inside it.
With you,
Gretchen
