“I’m Afraid That If I Slow Down, Everything I’ve Been Holding Will Collapse”
“I keep moving because I have to. If I stop—even for a minute—I’m afraid I’ll fall apart. There’s too much to carry, too much to do, and the second I sit still, it all catches up with me. I don’t even know how to rest anymore. I think if I let go, even a little, everything I’ve been holding will collapse and I won’t be able to get it back together.”
Dear Noah,
I felt a pang reading your words, because I know that feeling too. That sensation that your whole life is balanced on a thread—and if you stop moving, stop managing, stop holding it all together, something essential will break. Maybe it’s you. Maybe it’s everything. Either way, it feels safer to keep going.
This is one of the most misunderstood forms of strength: staying in motion not out of ambition, but out of fear. It doesn’t always look like distress to the outside world. Sometimes it looks like productivity. Like showing up. Like reliability. But inside, it’s frantic. It’s bracing. It’s exhaustion you’ve normalized just to survive.
And maybe you’ve even been praised for it—how strong you are, how resilient, how composed. But that praise only makes it harder to stop, doesn’t it? Because what happens when the performance ends and what’s underneath starts to show? What happens when you realize that your strength has become a kind of self-erasure?
I want to say something clearly: if you’re afraid that slowing down will make everything collapse, that fear deserves compassion, not correction. You’ve likely built your coping strategies for good reason. At some point, moving fast helped you stay safe. It protected you from overwhelm. It gave you a sense of control. It kept the pain at bay.
But the nervous system isn’t meant to run on overdrive forever. The constant motion might feel protective now, but over time, it starts to take more than it gives. It begins to pull you away from yourself. You start to live in forward momentum, not presence. You stop feeling joy because you’re too busy outrunning collapse.
And here’s the paradox: the collapse you’re so afraid of isn’t coming from slowing down. It’s coming from never stopping.
The emotional material you’re holding isn’t the enemy. It’s the backlog of everything you haven’t had time—or permission—to feel. Grief, fear, resentment, sadness, maybe even longing. Slowing down doesn’t cause the wave. It lets it move through you.
But you don’t have to flood all at once. You can slow down in increments. You can rest in short doses. You can begin to let yourself trust that the structure of your life won’t vanish if you pause. And even if something does fall apart, that doesn’t mean you’ve failed. It means something brittle needed to break so something more alive could emerge.
You are not weak for being tired. You are not dramatic for needing rest. You are not lazy for wanting ease.
Slowing down isn’t collapse—it’s contact. It’s meeting yourself without the armor. And while that might feel terrifying, it’s also where real strength lives.
You don’t have to outrun yourself anymore.
I’m learning that too.
–RJ