The Thing You're Gripping Is the Thing Killing You

I woke up at 4am with this thought. Not a polished thought — a sensation first, then the words catching up to it.

I've been in a transition for a while. Moving from someone who worked with practices, frameworks, ideas — to someone who positions herself as a systems theorist, who works with organisations and individuals, who has a methodology rather than a collection of tools. It's the right move. It's the true move. But for a while I felt like a fraud doing it.

Not because I wasn't capable. Because I hadn't done it yet. I hadn't sat with a client in that capacity, hadn't run a session, hadn't built the specific proof the world would recognise. I could see the version of myself who had. I just wasn't her yet in any way the outside world could confirm.

And I noticed — because I do a lot of noticing — the moment my sense of self started feeding from that future version. The moment her recognition became the thing I needed in order to feel like what I was doing now was legitimate.

That's the trap. And it's subtle enough that most people don't catch it.

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How you hand your worth over without noticing

It doesn't feel like fragility when you're in it. It feels like ambition. Like vision. Like taking something seriously.

What's actually happening is a perceptual narrowing. When your worth is placed in something external — an outcome, a result, another person's perception of you, a specific version of your future — your entire field of vision contracts around it. You can only see what confirms it or threatens it. Everything else — other options, other directions, the actual data in front of you — becomes invisible or irrelevant.

You also start working against yourself in ways that are hard to trace. You can't take an honest look at whether something is working, because the answer has too much riding on it. You can't pivot freely, because the original direction is the container for your self-worth. You can't receive information neutrally, because every piece of it is filtered through: does this mean I'm enough, or does it mean I'm not?

Nassim Taleb calls the opposite of this antifragility — building positions where you gain from disorder rather than collapse under it. Optionality is part of that: staying exposed to upside without committing everything to one outcome. Most people building something new are structurally fragile, not because the work is risky, but because their sense of self is the thing that's overexposed.

The vision gap and the impostor

There's a specific version of this that isn't named precisely enough.

You can see who you're becoming. You have a strong internal sense of a future version of yourself — her capability, her positioning, the quality of her work. She's real. You're not making her up. But the 3D evidence isn't there yet, and the world hasn't confirmed her yet, and in that gap the doubt enters.

Impostor syndrome isn't a lack of competence. It's what happens when you need external confirmation for an internal reality that is already true — before the outside world has had a chance to catch up.

The problem intensifies when the vision becomes a feeding source rather than a direction. Think of it as two straws. One draws from who you are right now — your actual capacity, your available actions, the step directly in front of you. The other draws from the future version — the motivation, the orientation, the reason you're building at all. You need both. But if the second straw becomes your primary source of emotional sustenance before you've built the thing, you've outsourced your stability to something that doesn't exist yet.

And then it starts to paralyse. Because you're waiting to feel like that person before you can act like this one.

What to do with the sensation

I process quickly. I'm not attached to a fixed shape for things — I expect them to change as I build them, and I treat the changes as information rather than failure. That is not a personality quirk. It's a structural choice about how to hold uncertainty.

But even I had to make the shift consciously. There's an internal sensation — noticeable after enough somatic work — between the state of feeding from external validation and the state of operating from internal grounding. They can feel almost identical when you're moving quickly. The difference is subtle: one is slightly effortful, slightly contracted, slightly scanning for confirmation. The other is looser. More available. Less invested in a specific response from the environment.

The move: keep the vision as orientation, not destination. Let it tell you which direction to face. But do the work of the step that's actually available right now, not the work you'll be doing when you're already there. Those are different tasks, and confusing them is where most of the stuckness lives.

I don't know exactly what my sessions with clients will look like yet. What I know is that I have the pattern recognition, the frameworks, the lived experience of navigating transition in real time. Trying itself is the thing that will reveal the rest. And the version of me who waits until she feels confirmed is not a version I'm interested in being.

The stripping, and what it reveals

Sometimes you don't choose to let go of the external container. It gets taken.

A relationship ends. A business fails. A plan collapses. A version of the future you were counting on simply doesn't arrive. And if your worth was inside it, the loss feels total — because it was. You weren't just losing the thing. You were losing the structure your sense of self was built around.

This is not a metaphor for growth. It is a mechanism. The stripping is sometimes the only process that separates the actual self from the scaffolding. Because insight doesn't do it. Deciding to be different doesn't do it. The removal of the thing is what shows you that you existed without it.

What's solid at zero was solid the whole time. You just couldn't feel it while everything else was louder.

The question worth asking when you notice the narrowing — when you feel the contraction of perception around an outcome — is: where is my worth actually sitting right now? Is it in me doing this work, or is it in a specific result this work produces?

One of those is a foundation. The other is a hostage situation you set up for yourself.

Worth that isn't contingent on anything external isn't something you build. It's something you remember. Usually when everything else has been removed.