Getting Out Your Own Way

Hey — it’s been a minute. January was the last time I showed up here, and honestly, a lot has happened since then. Some of it I’m still processing. But I’m back, I have things to say, and this piece felt like the right one to return with. Thanks for still being here.

It’s 4am.

The house is still. The street outside belongs to a different world — hushed, dark, unhurried. You’ve packed the night before. Checked the route twice. Set three alarms you didn’t need because you barely slept anyway.

You’re going somewhere. Somewhere real. Somewhere distant but sure — you know it exists, you know the road leads there, you know that if you stay on it long enough, you’ll arrive. You’ve known for a long time. That’s almost the painful part.

But you have to leave now. Before the sun. Before the noise. Before anyone is awake to see you go.

You get in the car. Pull out of the driveway in the dark, headlights cutting through the silence, and something in your chest — quiet, careful, like it doesn’t want to jinx it — says: Yes. Finally. We’re doing this!

You’re driving fast… Not the reckless kind of fast — the finally kind. Windows down, road open, something in your chest saying: Yes, this is it, keep going.

You know where you’re headed. You’ve always known. You’ve drawn it in journals, described it to God in quiet moments, seen it so clearly behind your eyes that sometimes you confuse it for a memory.

Then a figure steps into the road. A person.

You horn. Everything in you horns.

Please. You know where I’m going. You know how long I’ve been trying to get there. Move!

They don’t move, looking at you through the windscreen.

And you realise — they’re not confused. They’re not lost. They didn’t stumble into the road by accident. They’re standing there on purpose. Planted. Arms out. Looking you dead in the eyes.

Because they know your face.

They are your face.

---

You get out the car.

And you’re standing in front of yourself — this version. The one you’ve been living inside so long you stopped noticing where you end and it begins. Same eyes. Same hands. Same mouth that has said I want more than this a hundred times in private and then smiled and said I’m fine in public.

But up close, in the dark, at 4am on the morning you finally decided to leave — you see something you didn’t expect. They’re not angry.

They’re afraid.

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Here’s what nobody tells you about self-sabotage:

It isn’t self-destruction. Not really. It’s self-preservation — just by someone working with very old information.

This version of you was built in a different season. They were assembled carefully, piece by piece, out of everything you needed to survive a time that required you to be smaller, quieter, less. They learned not to want too loudly, because wanting and not receiving was a particular kind of pain you couldn’t keep absorbing. They learned to leave first, before you got left. To undermine before you got undermined. To stay close to the ground so that falling didn’t hurt so much.

They were good at their job. They kept you alive.

And now you’re packed and leaving at 4am and nobody told them this was happening — and everything in them is screaming that this is a threat, because the only thing they know for certain is this:

If you make it out — they don’t.

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And they’re not entirely wrong.

The you that arrives at that destination won’t need them the way you once did. Won’t need the deflection, the smallness, the pre-emptive self-destruction. Won’t need the armour they spent years building and polishing and wearing on your behalf. The old stories — I’m not the type, it won’t work for me, who am I to think I could— those won’t fit anymore. The habits, the patterns, the familiar shape of staying almost-but-not-quite there.

Leaving means leaving them too.

And they love you. In the only way they know how.

So they step into the road.

Every time the money starts to accumulate. Every time the right person finally notices you. Every time the door opens — they step into the road. Not to ruin you. To rescue you. To pull you back to the coordinates they know, the life they know how to navigate, the version of you they know how to keep safe.

They do it with perfect timing, every time, because they’ve been watching you longer than anyone. They know exactly when you’re about to go.

---

So what do you do?

You can’t run them over. They’re you. You’d only be destroying a part of yourself to prove a point, and you’ve done that before — it doesn’t work. They just come back. Different shape, same fear.

You can’t reason with them from the driver’s seat, horn blaring, engine running. That’s just the two of you at war with each other, and that war has no winner. You’ve been fighting it for years. Look where it’s gotten you.

You have to get out the car.

You have to stand in the road with them, in the dark, at 4am — and you have to speak to them like what they are. Not an enemy. Not a weakness. Not something to be ashamed of or conquered.

Someone who is scared.

Someone who needs to hear that you know what they did and why they did it. That you’re not leaving because they failed you. That you’re grateful — genuinely — for the years they spent keeping you together when falling apart would have cost you everything.

And then you have to tell them the truth:

That season is over. What kept us alive then will keep us stuck now. And I need you to trust me enough to let us find out what we’re capable of when we stop standing in our own way.

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Getting out of your own way isn’t about silencing that voice.

It’s about outgrowing the fear that created it.

It’s about looking at the part of you that has been blocking every exit, burning every bridge, dimming every light right before it shines too bright — and understanding it so completely that it loses its power over you.

Not because you defeated it. But because you finally gave it what it actually needed. Not another reason to stay…

Just the reassurance that even if you go — you’re not leaving yourself behind.