It’s morning. I’m sitting with my coffee, looking at the day ahead, but instead of feeling ready for it, I feel low. 

Nothing terrible has happened. There hasn’t been one big failure or one moment I can point to and say, that’s why I feel this way. 

It’s more like a collection of little things from yesterday that my mind has decided to bring into this morning with me. 

The meeting I rushed through. The bedtime story I cut short because my phone buzzed again. The workout I promised myself and skipped. The message I forgot to reply to.  

One by one, they show up, and each one lands in my chest with a small, familiar ache. 

And I find myself asking, why does my brain do this to me? 

Why does it hold on so tightly to every sad moment and every “I should have done better,” while the good things slip away so easily?  

There are so many of them. The women whose confidence I’ve watched grow. The newborns and mothers who got the care they needed. The company I built from nothing. The moments my child laughed so hard that nothing else mattered.  

Those wins are all there, but my mind walks right past them as if they belong to someone else. 

I think I know why this is on my heart tonight. Somewhere along the way, I started believing that as a woman (or may be a super-woman!), I should be able to do it all. 

Be the best in the career I have chosen myself. Be the perfect wife and the perfect mother. And look after my body and mind through all of it, glowing and smiling as if it costs me nothing. 

It sounds beautiful when I say it out loud. But nobody tells you how heavy it gets when you’re actually carrying it. 

Last week I caught myself asking a question I’m almost scared to look at: am I afraid of seeing the real cost of success? 

Because if I give my career everything it needs, will I become the mother who wasn’t there? 

Just writing that makes my throat tighten. I can’t accept it. I won’t. So I do what so many women do.  

I stretch.  

I stretch my hours, my energy, my patience, my heart, in every direction, so that I never have to choose and never have to say “not today” to someone I love. 

And on the nights I’m exhausted from all that stretching, my brain doesn’t comfort me. It doesn’t say, “Look how far you’ve come. You’re doing your best.”  

It becomes a harsh judge reading out the list of everything I got wrong. 

I’m still learning, slowly, and not always gracefully, that the feeling of failure doesn’t always mean I’m failing. Sometimes it just means I care so deeply about so many things that my heart is stretched thin.  

Maybe that’s not weakness. Maybe it’s what a full heart feels like. 

I don’t have the answers yet. I am just wanting to learn to be a little gentler with the woman who is trying so hard to hold it all together. 

Does your mind do this to you too? What do you do when the inner critic gets louder than everything else? 

I really would love to hear from you.