Healing Over Hustling: The Pressure to Perform

It's nearing the 10th month of the year, and I am still trapped in this dysfunctional financial destitution loop. I have been busting my arse, grinding myself into the ground, and working my fingers to the bone, yet I cannot catch a break. Every month has arrived with a verdict in hand, and it feels accusatory. The deficit deepens despite every attempt at real resolution.

I feel the weight of this wait unlike anything else because I genuinely cannot bear to remain in this position anymore. Not to say I wanted to be here before, but before, I could still ignorantly pretend the strength to determine what destination was next came from having more time.

Truth is, we always think we have more time.

And we don't.

Equally, we always think we have more time till we don't.

I am stuck somewhere between them both: we don't and till we don't. Suspended between the knowledge that time is disappearing and the terror of discovering exactly what disappears with it.

There's this air of despair and desperation that seeks to hold your thoughts hostage, tightening around your chest until even faith feels like another performance you are failing to deliver. No matter how much you believe, it seems to notice the smallest twinge of uncertainty rising in your spirit and magnify it until doubt is the only thing you can hear.

If you're not careful, you're crying, out of breath, shaking, and heading to the ER for another somatization diagnosis presenting as anything it can be easily identified as and charged for by an allopathic practitioner. Your body becomes the emergency because your life has been one for far too long.

In my lived experiences, a popular la familia quip is:

“Thank God I don't look like what I been through!”

Boop boop.

But the truth is, that is usually after the fact.

Because in tandem truth, sometimes we do look like we're changing or carrying something, even if we don't look dragged from the outside. Sometimes the strain leaks through our eyes, our silence, our shortened patience, our inability to rest without feeling guilty.

Sometimes we look gathered when everything around us feels scattered.

Sometimes we look composed because falling apart would inconvenience everyone else.

So, what does desperation look like?

What do performative displays of a gathered appearance look like?

What does being Exhausted From Surviving™ look like when exhaustion has become your baseline and rest feels like a threat to your income, your identity, and your ability to keep the whole thing from collapsing?

What does being Overworked. UnderSupported!™ look like when everyone praises your strength while quietly depending on your continued depletion?

What does it look like to be carrying more than anyone can see while still showing up like you can handle it? It looks like swallowing panic before answering the phone. It looks like making plans with money you do not have, hope you cannot afford, and energy your body has already spent.

How do you develop the truth of who you really are when you're so used to being solid no matter what you're growing through? How do you admit that the armor is cutting into you when everyone has mistaken it for skin?

And what happens when the pressure is no longer just to survive—

but to perform like surviving isn't costing you anything?

What happens when you are expected to make the struggle inspirational, the deprivation productive, the breakdown aesthetically pleasing, and the pain proof that you are destined for something greater?

Cause today I am WRITE here.

Every letter, every word, every paragraph, every thought is me WRITE NOW.

These words may be scribblings to someone else, but they are where I reside—perhaps rightfully so.

However—and the comma matters—they have exacerbated my temperance and escalated my tolerance to the level of my next question:

How do I activate change that remains active after the momentum shifts?

The pressure to perform can become embedded so deeply within that it begins to resemble your outward appearance, all while concealing the mental contradiction happening within.

How do I break this chain without extinguishing the very desire that ignited my need to disassemble it?

Cause I am painfully, tearfully, still WRITE HERE...

WRITTEN NOW.

Without any fancy editing. Without some fluffy thematic conjecture.

Just raw.

Just real.

Just WRITTEN.