The Myth of Urgency

Why everything feels urgent — and why almost nothing is

Last week, I found myself somewhere I haven’t been in a long time: complete dissociation.

Nothing had gone terribly wrong. From the outside, my life looked full, even good. But inside, something was starting to shut down.

I could feel it in my body before I could name it, that subtle tightening, the sense that everything on my plate suddenly carried the same weight. Emails, conversations, decisions, loose ends. It all started to feel critically important, like I couldn’t set anything down without something else collapsing.

So I did what my nervous system has done for most of my life.

I left.

Not physically, but internally. I stopped listening to myself. I stopped noticing the quiet signals coming from my body that I was tired, that I was overwhelmed, that I felt disconnected from myself and from my partner.

I couldn’t feel anything: not joy, not sadness, not connection. I was short-tempered in my relationships, snapping at my partner and feeling rushed in moments of closeness. I was doomscrolling on Instagram to distract myself. I was barely eating. Sleeping (one of my favorite things) was a chore. I felt like a caged animal in survival mode.

I slipped into that familiar state of freeze, where the only thing that matters is getting through. Just keep going. Just get it all done. You can rest later.

For years, this was my baseline. Through my PhD, through the early years of my career, through a life that looked impressive from the outside but felt strangely distant from the inside. It’s a strange state to live in, because you can function, you can produce, you can even appear successful, but you’re not really there. You’re not in your body, not in your relationships, not in your life.

So when I noticed it happening again last week, I felt frustrated. How is this happening again? Haven’t I already worked through this?

And then, underneath that frustration, something quieter surfaced: Healing is a spiral.

We don’t return to old patterns because we’ve failed. We return because there’s something new to see.