I Didn’t Meet My Younger Self for Coffee — She Showed Up Uninvited (Part 2)
A story about the red light, the performance, and the version of me who never needed to earn her place.
Chapter 4
The Moment Before Everything Shifts.
There is a moment, just before the red light blinks on, when everything inside you shifts.
A heartbeat ago, you were laughing, your mind drifting elsewhere, caught between unfinished conversations, a half-formed thought, the song looping in your head, the scene from last night’s movie lingering like perfume. That thing you said or didn’t say, the argument you lost, your weekend plans.
And then, in an instant, you switch. Your posture straightens. Your breath slows. The noise in your head quiets, not because it’s gone, but because you push it back far enough to make space for what’s coming.
I’ve spent a lifetime mastering that shift.
Transforming in front of that tiny red light. Holding a straight face when I wanted to fall apart. Standing tall when I wanted to retreat. Turning the volume down on myself so the world only saw what I needed it to see.
Because life, much like a live broadcast, doesn’t wait for you to be ready. It doesn’t pause for your crappy morning, your heartbreak, your exhaustion, your doubts. The camera rolls. The world keeps moving.
So you do, too.
But here’s the thing they don’t tell you about keeping your back straight and your expression unreadable for too long. Eventually, you forget what it feels like to let your shoulders drop. To let your voice waver. To not be fine.
You hold your breath. You clench your jaw. Your shoulders creep up and stay there, like armor you forgot how to take off.
It’s called somatic tension, and when left unchecked, it often turns into somatic anxiety. A response to chronic stress, emotional overload, and a nervous system that never gets to rest.
Your body braces for impact…again and again.
And eventually, it stops resetting. The tension becomes chronic. The pain becomes familiar.
Until one day, you realize that the heaviness isn’t just emotional. It’s physiological.
And the permission to exhale? It has to come from you.
I used to think composure was control. Now I think it’s the pause between who I am and who the world expects me to be.
And I wonder, how many times have I convinced even myself that I was fine, steady, unshaken, because that’s the role I’d learned to play?
The Silence Before the Break
There are the other moments, the ones without a red light or script. Not in front of a camera.
It’s the slow realization that something is shifting. That you’re standing at the edge of something irreversible.
It’s the moments before leaving a job I thought I’d never leave. Before pressing send on a decision I couldn’t undo. Before I hit publish on words that made me visible in a way I wasn’t sure I was ready for.
They feel weirdly familiar.
Like the ocean pulling back before the wave crashes in.
Somewhere inside us, we know. Before logic. Before the collapse.
And maybe that feeling isn’t a warning. Maybe it’s not meant to protect us from the fall, but to bring us into it.
So we don’t miss it. So we don’t numb it. So we can stand inside the storm and say:
“I’m here. I’m awake. I’m listening.”
Presence doesn’t protect us from pain. It gives it meaning.
So you brace for impact. Your breath slows. Your mind races through all the things you should have done differently.
The past grows loud. The future looms too big.
And yet, you straighten your back. You hold your ground. Not because you’re certain, but because you’ve trained yourself to perform steadiness in the face of collapse.
Have you felt these moments?
Every time, I told myself I was fine. Because that’s what we do.
But the thing about holding everything in for too long? Eventually, you forget how to let yourself fall apart.
Maybe I don’t need to brace so hard.
Maybe I just need to stand there, open, aware, willing to let it break me open instead of break me down.
A (Semi) Proper Introduction
In the last edition, I promised you a proper introduction, or at least, a semi-proper one. But let’s be real, proper has never really been my thing.
It feels like my life has been one long inhale in front of a blinking red light. A lifetime curating presence. Mastering performance. Delivering steadiness when everything inside me was shaking.
Maybe that’s why my first time going live on radio, one of my very first days as a journalist, was in the immediate aftermath of September 11. No trial runs. No easing in.
I was handed a microphone and asked to find words for something that had none.
I learned that day how to breathe through uncertainty. (Yes, I will probably use this in every single chapter.) How to hold space for disaster without letting it consume me. How to be steady, even when everything inside me was anything but.
What I didn’t know then was that uncertainty wasn’t a moment to endure, it was a way of life I had yet to embrace.
I used to believe in certainty. I built my life around it, the way a straight-A student builds a perfect record without trying too hard, or caring too much. The way an introvert learns to wield humor as a bridge to connection, to attention, to covering the scars. I categorized life like an ER doctor triages patients, knowing what mattered, what didn’t, what could wait.
I knew my reds.
And then, life started unfolding in ways I hadn’t predicted.
And I realized…I had been afraid of the spaces in between. The transitions. The not-quite-there-yets. The moments when the script dissolves and you’re left staring at a blank page.
But now, I know, that is where the story begins.
Once, I Lived in My Imagination. Then the World Got Loud
Let’s rewind.
I was the child who read books like they were escape routes.
Before I ever boarded a plane, I had wandered the surrealist pages of Breton, drifting down the streets of Paris without ever leaving my room. I had wept through the poetry of damned poets who weren’t afraid of darkness, who bled onto the page like it was their only way out, and imagined new worlds that felt more like home than the one I lived in.
I wrote before I understood why I needed to.
It was oxygen.
It was a sanctuary.
Then the world got loud.
I wanted to write. So I became a journalist.
For two decades, I adapted. Delivered.
The world demanded volume, speed, certainty. So I gave it all of that, until one day, I couldn’t hear myself anymore.
And everything collapsed.
Call it awakening. Call it unraveling.
I had spent so long chasing success that I forgot to define it for myself.
One by one, the masks slipped. And underneath them?
Failure. But not the kind I feared.
Not proof that I was broken.
Not shame. Not regret.
Failure as truth. Failure as freedom. Failure as the moment I stopped pretending to be someone I wasn’t.
“The day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.”— Anaïs Nin
The Girl I Forgot
I have lived between knowing and not knowing. Between performing certainty and learning to sit inside the in-betweens.
This is for my younger self. The girl I left behind.
The girl who wrote because she had to.
Who built her world out of words when the real one didn’t fit.
She is the reason I’m writing again.
She is the reason I stopped waiting for permission.
And maybe, she’s the reason you’re here, too.
There was a time I thought I was just growing up. Becoming, adapting.
I didn’t realize I was also abandoning her. The girl who made sense of the world through pages and poetry. The one who felt everything.
Somewhere along the way, I stopped checking in with her. I got busy performing, achieving, becoming someone that made sense to others, even if it stopped making sense to me.
But she’s back now. Quiet, but steady.
She doesn’t need much from me now. Just honesty. Just presence. Just a promise that I won’t abandon her again.
It’s taken years to realize, it was never about becoming someone else. It was always about returning.
And maybe what I thought was a collapse, wasn't failure at all. Maybe it was the invitation to stop performing, to stop holding everything together, to meet her again.
And this time, stay.
We Weren’t Born Afraid to Fail
We were handed all the wrong questions.
Not ‘Who are you?’
But: Be something. Be someone. Be certain.
Success, as we were taught, was never designed to be lived, only measured.
From school to career, we followed a linear track: grades, degree, job, house, family, retire.
If you fall behind? You’re failing. If you don’t know? You’re lost.
But research in career development and behavioral psychology says something radically different.
According to Herminia Ibarra, professor at London Business School, people don’t find their true path by following a plan, they find it by experimenting their way forward.
In her book Working Identity, she writes about exploring "possible selves", different paths aligned with your interests, through real-world testing, not introspection. Clarity comes through action and feedback, not endless planning.
Which means the roadmap we were handed? Flawed from the start.
The Fear of Failure: A Learned Response
From a young age, we’re conditioned to see failure not as an event, but as an identity.
Psychologist Martin Seligman’s concept of learned helplessness explains it well, how repeated failures teach us not to try at all.
This was first observed in an experiment in the 1960s, where dogs were placed in a setting where they had no control over electric shocks. Over time, even when given the option to escape, they stopped trying, they had learned that failure was inevitable.
And humans? We don’t escape this just because we grow up, we layer it.
We’re shamed early for mistakes. We stop raising our hands. We avoid the hard questions. We trade curiosity for correctness. More on this, and how creativity reshapes our relationship with failure, in the next edition.
By adulthood, we play small. We stay safe. And we call it being realistic.
But the science says:
Mistakes strengthen our brain’s ability to learn.
Ambiguity fuels our creativity.
Discomfort builds resilience.
So why were we told to fear the very thing that makes us better?
Because safe, measurable, controlled people fit systems better than wild, curious, brave ones.
We smiled through confusion. We stayed the course, even when it wasn’t ours. But the goddamn truth is, growth was never meant to be neat. It was meant to be real.
And the parts of us that stumble, pause, and wander? They’re not lost. They’re just breaking free from a script that was never ours to begin with.
Maybe It’s Time to Find Out
We grow up believing our worth is something to earn. Tie it to success. To productivity. To being chosen. To being perfect.
But what if we’ve been measuring worth in all the wrong ways?
Dr. Gabor Maté talks about contingent self-worth versus genuine self-worth. One is built on validation from others. The other is built on presence, truth, and being.
We’re trained from early on to equate praise with performance. To treat love like it’s conditional. To believe failure means we are broken.
But we don’t have to perform worthiness. We don’t have to chase validation. We just have to remember.
So ask yourself, who would you be if you stopped measuring?
What if you stopped justifying your place in the world?
What if you already were enough, long before anyone told you otherwise?
Maybe it’s time to find out.
She Never Left
There is a moment, just before the red light blinks on, when everything inside you shifts.
And maybe that moment isn’t asking you to perform. Maybe it’s asking you to tell the truth.
Maybe SHE came back, not to test me. Not to shame me for forgetting. But to remind me.
To sit beside me in the quiet. To ask gently, not "are you ready to become?" but:
Are you ready to return?
Return to the version of you who never questioned if she was worthy.
Return to the one who knew how to begin again.
Return to the one who didn’t wait for the red light to speak.
And if that’s true,
Then maybe the red light isn’t a cue to start performing.
Maybe it’s a sign to start being honest with yourself.
That you never had to become anything.
You just had to come back to you.
Is the red light blinking for you, too? Remember, you don’t owe anyone a performance. Not even here.
But if there’s a part of you that’s been waiting to be seen, start with one line in the comments. I’ll meet you there.
Until next time,
Eleni
Every Monday at 11:30 CET, the Glorious Fail will meet you where you are, ready to disrupt, challenge, and rebrand failure.
P.S. You’ll find something a little different woven into this chapter, three short audio clips, whispered in a soft, not-so-steady voice I’ve only recently dared to use.
It’s part ASMR, part storytelling, part experiment. :)
If you listen, I’d love to know what you think, honestly.
Whispers, thoughts, reactions, all welcome in the comments.
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