After You Learn to See
“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” -Viktor Frankl
It usually shows up on Sunday night as you emotionally prepare for the week ahead. Not as a thought. It feels like physical pressure. Nothing happening, simply your body already dealing with the daily stresses at work.
For me it lived in my chest. There was a tightness that didn’t hurt but wouldn’t let go. Shallow breathing that felt normal, even when I tried to take a deep breath and couldn’t. You feel it to. In your clenched jaw or tight shoulders.
Sitting on the couch with my family, I’d be half-listening, half elsewhere. Running simulations of conversations that hadn’t happened yet. Replaying ones that already had looking for clues. Solving complex problems no one had asked me to solve in order to be prepared. I was donating attention to a system that wasn’t paying me for it in my off hours. And the worse part, I couldn’t see what I was trading away. My peace.
I assured myself this was responsibility and professionalism. That this was what it meant to care. It wasn’t. It was the system living in my body. Not metaphorically. Literally. I could feel it in how my shoulders never quite relaxed. Or how my jaw stayed set unless I consciously let go.
Most of us made a deal early on. We sell a portion of our life for pay. Time, attention, energy, skill. That part was explicit when we joined the workforce. It seemed fair, even. You show up, you work, you get paid. You go home.
I understood that deal. I honored it.
What wasn’t in the contract is how completely the system evolved to follow us home and embed itself as a priority role in our personal lives. It now sits alongside our children’s dance recitals, school plays, vacations, and birthdays as a standing condition. Work no longer competes with life; it carries the assumed right of way. In each of us, there is a reflex built by the system that allows it to take precedence at any moment, often without asking. Over time, we’ve learned to stop ourselves on its behalf.
Phones in our pockets with work email on them. Slack pings during dinner. A low-grade vigilance for the office that never quite shuts off fully. When COVID arrived with work-from-home rules, the system finished normalizing what had already been creeping in.
Home became an extension of work.
Constant presence became a condition of employment.
Availability became assumed.
For years, I didn’t question this. I adapted. I answered messages quickly. I thought ahead. I stayed one step in front of problems so they wouldn’t surprise me. I told myself this was professionalism. I told myself this was leadership. What I didn’t realize was that I was never actually off.
Even on vacation, I wasn’t fully present. Part of me stayed vigilant, rehearsing work concerns in the background. In prayer, my attention slipped. In rest, my body remained on watch.
Then something changed. I healed enough that the vigilance stopped feeling necessary. Not all at once. Gradually. But enough that the background fear softened and that’s when the vigilance stopped feeling useful.
I began to notice that the constant mental rehearsal wasn’t producing insight. The tension wasn’t making me more ethical or more effective. The fear wasn’t protecting anything. It was just there, taking up energy and emotional space.
It also was burning my attention, consuming all sense of presence and occupying space in my life with permission explicitly asked for or granted. That’s when I could finally name it.
This isn’t burnout. It’s earlier than that. It’s the slow occupation of your inner life by a system that is never satisfied. It no longer needs to demand anything of you because it has already moved in and runs alongside your life.
The Deal We Made — and the Deal That Changed
The original bargain was simple. You sell hours. You get paid. Work ends. Life resumes.
The new bargain is quieter and more invasive. The system doesn’t just buy your time. It rents space in your mind. It occupies your nervous system with vigilance you were never compensated for.
Nothing in your offer letter mentioned this.
Yet here we are.
Always available. Always partially on. Always carrying tomorrow’s work problems unless we explicitly give ourselves permission to avoid it. The system didn’t ask you for your permission. It didn’t need to. It just waited until technology made it easy and then normalized it.
At some point I realized something that now feels obvious but didn’t then. I did agree to sell my labor. My fears, those are not for hire anymore. That distinction took me years to see.
Why Fear Felt Normal to Me
Here’s the part that mattered most, and the part I didn’t understand for most of my life.
I grew up hypervigilant, shaped by a chaotic and abusive childhood. Complex trauma wires the body to stay alert as a survival strategy. I learned early that safety is conditional — that it can be withdrawn, that it has to be monitored, protected, and earned. Staying ahead of danger becomes the only reliable way to stay intact.
In that state, vigilance doesn’t register as fear. It registers as responsibility. As attentiveness. As care. Over time, it even comes to feel like maturity. So when work demanded constant alertness, it didn’t feel imposed. It felt familiar.
The system didn’t create my fear. It found it already installed.
Because it felt normal, I never questioned it. I assumed everyone lived this way. I assumed the tension was the price of competence.
It isn’t.
There’s a well-documented pattern hiding in plain sight: people with early trauma are overrepresented among high performers. Not because trauma creates talent, but because it creates adaptations.
Hypervigilance becomes “attention to detail.”
Anxiety becomes “urgency.”
People-pleasing becomes “stakeholder management.”
Fear of abandonment becomes “commitment.”
These are the raw adaptions of childhood trauma survival strategies. Yet in adulthood, systems value, appreciate and leverage those adaptions.
Healing Changed the Equation
Healing did something I didn’t expect.
As the trauma loop softened, the Sunday-night, before-work vigilance sessions stopped paying dividends. The fear isn’t making me more ethical, smarter or competent. It just burned attention.
I remember the first time I saw this clearly. I was lying in bed, my mind cycling through work as always, when I realized nothing bad would happen if I stopped. No failure would be made more likely nor prevented. No one would be protected. The fear wasn’t doing anything useful. It wasn’t serving the work, and it wasn’t serving me. It was simply there because it had always been there.
That was the moment it became impossible to ignore what was actually happening. The system wasn’t demanding fear. It didn’t need to. It was accepting it. And I had been supplying it automatically, faithfully, without ever stopping to ask whether it was required.
Gabor Maté names this pattern with uncomfortable clarity.
Trauma is not what happens to you.
Trauma is what happens inside you.
And our society is built to exploit it.
That line landed hard because it explained something I could feel but had never articulated.
Hypervigilance often looks like commitment. Anxiety can pass for urgency. Fear can resemble drive to an untrained eye. These states don’t announce themselves as distress; they present as engagement, care, and effort. Systems don’t have to create them. They only have to reward and incentivize them.
I didn’t understand that intellectually at first. I recognized it by watching myself. I noticed how often I stayed mentally engaged when nothing was being asked of me. How easily I volunteered attention, anticipation, and concern long before it was required. Once I saw that pattern clearly, something else became obvious: I wasn’t being pressured to give more of myself.
I was offering it.
In the end, I gave it away for nothing.
Where Gabor Maté shows how fear is installed and exploited inside the individual, W. Edwards Deming warned that the same fear, left unchecked, eventually destroys a system’s ability to see the truth at all.
That was the pivot.
I stopped treating fear as a moral issue and started treating it as a quality defect.
Seeing What My Body Already Knew
There was a moment at work when my body reacted before my language did. This wasn’t a moral revelation or a crisis. It was an example of what happens when you stop ignoring somatic signals and start treating them as valuable information.
I was walking a bottle-pick line in a warehouse. Among the rows, I can across pint liquor bottles. Ordinary, single-serve units. And yet my stomach turned slightly. Not disgust. Not judgment. Just a quiet recognition by my senses that these formats often are associated with maintaining dependence, not occasional recreational use. That association registered in my body before it took shape as a thought.
I didn’t dramatize it. I didn’t condemn anyone. I didn’t pretend I could fix a system that would exist with or without me. I did what I know how to do.
I observed the process. I mapped incentives. I looked for where cost, damage, and waste already lived in the system. I found a small, legitimate lever that aligned with existing priorities, and I acted there. The change was modest. Boring, even.
And it worked.
I didn’t fix the system. I fixed my relationship to it. I reduced the distance between what I noticed and how I acted, using the system toward an end it already recognized as valid.
And something important happened.
The internal noise dropped.
What I Reverse-Engineered
I didn’t set out to build a philosophy. I simply noticed a change in myself and worked backward to understand why it held. What I learned is simple, and it’s not aspirational.
When something feels off, I no longer rush to explain it away or convert it into judgment. I treat the bodily signal as early data. Not emotion. Information.
I slow myself down long enough to see what the system is actually doing. What it rewards. What it tolerates. What it quietly punishes. Most of the time, the problem isn’t malevolence. It’s misalignment reinforced by incentives no one is naming.
I don’t look for permission to redesign the system. I look for a place where my authority is real and the lever already exists. Waste. Risk. Cost. Friction. Delay. Those are the only moves that stick.
Then I act. Small. Clean. Defensible. Afterward, I pay attention to MY system response. If the action is aligned, my nervous system settles. The background vigilance drops. The noise fades. If it isn’t in alignment, the noise stays.
That’s how I know whether I acted truthfully.
That’s the loop I trust.
What I No Longer Do
What I no longer do is carry work where it doesn’t belong.
I don’t run unpaid simulations in my body. I don’t stay alert to problems that haven’t arrived. I don’t pre-emptively brace for conversations that haven’t been scheduled. I don’t confuse constant readiness with responsibility, or anxiety with care.
I don’t let a system that compensates me for output quietly claim my nervous system as part of the deal. That habit cost more than it ever returned, and I stopped paying it.
Reclaiming Yourself from the System
If you want to do this work yourself, start smaller than you think.
Don’t take on the whole system, and don’t start with the parts you hate or fear most. Respect what you cannot change, and learn where your influence is real.
You’ll feel it in your body before you think it. The places in the system that make your body tighten are often inflection points—areas where incentives and your sense of well-being are quietly in conflict.
Notice where something feels off, but not dramatic. A meeting. A report. A process you touch regularly that asks you, subtly, to look away from something you can feel but haven’t named yet. That’s your signal. Not outrage. Information.
Resist the urge to judge it or fix it all at once. Judgment burns energy and collapses options. Instead, study incentives. Ask what this part of the system actually rewards, what it tolerates, and what it quietly ignores.
Then look for a lever that already exists. Waste. Risk. Cost. Friction. Delay. Exposure. Every system has them. You’re not inventing morality; you’re working with gravity.
Act there. Small. Clean. Defensible. In a way that still makes sense to someone who doesn’t share your inner conflict.
That’s your version of the pint bottle.
You’re not trying to redeem the system. You’re reducing the distance between what you notice and how you behave. You’re giving your nervous system evidence that you don’t have to stay on alert just to remain intact.
Then pay attention to what happens next.
If the move is aligned, the noise drops.
If it isn’t, it won’t.
That’s how you know whether you’ve reclaimed something real.
This isn’t rebellion. It isn’t virtue. It isn’t withdrawal.
It’s maintenance.
And if enough people start here—quietly, locally, without spectacle—the system will still exist.
But it will no longer live in quite so many bodies.
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Author’s Note
For most of my life, fear lived in my body as vigilance. It kept me safe. It also made me very good at seeing systems, anticipating failure, and carrying responsibility early and often. For a long time, I couldn’t tell where trauma ended and competence began. The system didn’t care. It rewarded the output.
Healing didn’t take away my edge. It brought crystalized intelligence forward. What changed wasn’t my work, but how much of my nervous system the work was allowed to occupy.
This essay is a record of that shift. Of learning how to stay inside systems without being colonized by them. Of discovering that integration doesn’t look like withdrawal or softness, but like precision, restraint, and quieter participation.
I’m not offering a theory. I’m naming a lived transition. If it resonates, it’s likely because your body already knows what I’m describing.