Read the Poison

Your anxiety is not a mood. It is a reading.

Something is eating you right now. Stop trying to make it stop. Read it instead. It is pointing at the exact place you overstepped.

Anxious? You are gripping an outcome that was never yours to command. You have mistaken a result for a responsibility.

Resentful? You are demanding the world bend where it will not. You have handed another man the keys to your peace.

Frustrated? You are hammering a locked door and calling it effort.

The feeling is not the problem. The feeling is the instrument. Each one names a place your will is spending itself where it has no reach — and the cost comes due in your mind, your body, your sleep.

So read the poison. Find the overstep. Take your hands off what was never yours to move.

Then go spend your strength where it lands.