There it is again. The tightness in my chest when someone questions my work. The urge to defend, explain, justify. I've felt this a hundred times. Maybe a thousand.
For years I treated these moments like problems to solve. Something wrong with me that needed fixing. But lately I've been trying something different. Instead of pushing through or pushing down, I just watch. I notice where the reaction lives in my body. I let it sit there without doing anything about it. Simple as.
What I'm finding is that the pattern itself isn't the enemy. It's information. It's my system telling me something got triggered, something old, something that probably made sense once. The pattern is doing exactly what it was designed to do. It's not personal. The question is whether I can see it happening instead of just being swept along.
We move through life reacting without noticing. The pattern fires, we do the thing, and only later do we wonder why we snapped at someone or shut down or made that choice we regret. But there's a gap there if we look for it. A moment between the trigger and the response where we can just... watch.
That gap is what I'm after. Not perfection. Not some enlightened state where nothing bothers me. Just enough awareness to see my own patterns in motion. Because once you can see them, you're no longer entirely at their mercy. You're still you, still human, still reactive sometimes. But now there's a witness in the room.