i don't know what the hell to do next

and other yellow stories

Often, I don’t know what to do next. I’m telling you. I don’t mean creatively, spiritually, or even career-wise. I mean it literally. What. Next??? What The Hell Next?

Will I close the laptop? Will I take a walk? Will I speak to the friendships I am driving away? Will I give my eyes a break from the strain, leave my phone untouched for an hour? Two hours? Will I sit down, let myself breathe? Oh. It’s time to eat again. Will I look in the fridge and see something different, something new?

What is the world? How are we living? How are we complicit, and how are we helpless?

Will I send a pitch email or give myself a break?

And should I break,

or break down,

Will I lie on the carpet, between the sofa and the TV? Who will I call? Who will hear me? Who can I trust with this stinking malaise?

I have noticed (and if this is not you, as you were, don’t worry, haha, I’ll see myself out), but so many people are operating in a state of panic, a low-grade, terrible fog. There is no apparent danger (well, apart from THIS THE WORLD) and no clear direction, either. It’s as though we got so used to surviving that we forget how to live. How to count out the coins in our hands. How to Have a Full Body Experience and Be in The Room With Our Loved Ones. How to be.

Yeah, how to be! I have done so much numbing that it’s come back to cause havoc. Each time I finish a major life project, I know I should take some time to reflect on it. Still, such things are not yet intuitive, and who can blame anyone for not wanting to celebrate?

I have to relearn how to receive. I am still trying to earn my peace. I come from a long line of people who didn’t have the time, or dare I say, the luxury to ask themselves how they felt. You gritted your teeth and got right into it. You worked all night and all day, smiled when your heart just couldn’t.

So even now, when I go to rest, something is telling me there’s More To Do. I will sit down to ‘relax’, look down to find that I’ve opened seven more tabs on Substack, looked up some flights I’ll never take to places I can’t afford. Emails. More Emails. I have trained myself to feel safer in motion, which is exhausting.

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Solutions.

My 5-minute voicenote “inner room 02”

A short, poetic checkpoint, ‘What I am doing to re-teach my brain,’ toward unlearning this old, tired urgency response and rebuilding internal safety