Speed and loneliness
I move too fast for most people.
I don’t know why this realization just manifested itself with a giant “WHOMP” this morning, as it’s something I’ve known pretty much forever.
Many therapists and coaches have told me I need to slow down.
My best friend has told me that my pace makes HER tired.
My husband often reminds me that sitting on the couch watching TV isn’t a waste of time.
I’m in a reinvention phase right now, so there’s a lot that’s swirling in my head. Ideas, questions, lists, doubts, all of it. At the same time, I’ve also gotten better (not great) at trusting my intuition on things, which means that when I feel a pull toward something, I’m immediately inclined to follow it. Or at the very least, dive in to investigate.
The friction here is that:
a) I’m not listening to the sticky note above my desk that says “Don’t Dig in Deeper, Let The Ideas Breathe”
b) I still like / want / need a sounding board to help me figure out if I’m actually on to something smart, or just drinking my own Kool-Aid.
I talk out loud to myself plenty, but I honestly get in my own way more often than not. I’m a great self-therapist but not a great collaborator. Bouncing rapid-fire notions around with someone else is the best way I know how I process the constant swirling.
Except.
I move too fast for most people.
I woke up at 3:30 am yesterday morning and couldn’t get back to sleep, so I started working on one of the many entrepreneurial ideas I’m incubating. I sent a few emails with some questions and brain-pickings to a few friends who are in-the-know about this, and by no fault of theirs, I am filled with anxiety that, a mere 24 hours later, I haven’t heard back. The anxiety isn’t coming from a belief that “oh no, they didn’t respond, so they must not want to help,” or even “oh no, they don’t like what I shared, and don’t know what to say about it.” It’s coming from the fact that in the last 24 hours, I’ve already moved three steps ahead of what I asked for their feedback on. I still have questions and doubts, but I’m onto the next intersection now.
I exhaust myself with my speed. I am pretty confident that I also exhaust others with my speed. Even if I never explicitly ask them to match it (which I am very intentional not to), I feel like my expectations are written between the lines. And even bigger than that…I feel like sometimes it pushes people away.
My speed can sometimes be a superpower. I have the ability to assess a situation, ask some questions, and arrive at a decision or next step pretty quickly. It may not always be the right next step, but I would rather make a quick mistake and have to fix it than be paralyzed by inaction and not make any decisions at all. This, however, is not how a lot of other people work. And so to them, my speed feels reckless. Or not considered. Or, at its worst, “just too much.”
Why does everything always come back to me feeling like I’m too too much or not enough?
While I am exhausted by my own speed these past few weeks, I also recognize that there’s something exciting about ideating and iterating at this pace. There’s an energy and a momentum that I don’t want to lose. But I also don’t want to lose the people I trust to give me feedback along the way.
Maybe at the core of this, I need to figure out how to shift the balance of where I’m placing that trust—more in myself, and less in others—so that I don’t give into the anxiety that comes with asking for thoughts and not receiving them immediately.
Maybe I need to realign my expectations about what time and attention other people really have, or want to give me. I am so used to bending over backwards to help everyone else that I guess I expect the same from them. But that’s not healthy, or realistic.
So perhaps I’m not going to slow down, at least right now. But I am going to try to rely less on other people’s input. That makes me sad, though. And makes me feel a little alone.
—
“You’re on your own kid, you always have been.”
Clearly, Taylor’s been here, too.