The Art of Taking Your Energy Back From Everyone Who Didn't Earn It

(Or: Why Your Nervous System Has Been Running an Open Tab at Every Bar You've Ever Walked Past)

You’ve been leaving pieces of yourself everywhere like you’re a human breadcrumb factory. In your ex’s DMs you definitely shouldn’t have checked. In that meeting where you performed “competent and unbothered” for 90 minutes straight. In your mother’s sigh that somehow became your responsibility to decode and solve. In the 47 browser tabs still open from that research spiral you started three weeks ago and never finished because you got distracted by another crisis that also didn’t get finished.

Your nervous system has been running an open tab with the entire world, and honey, the bill is coming due. Every thread of attention you’ve sent out is still out there, humming, costing you something. Your body feels it as the particular exhaustion that sleep doesn’t fix.

Meanwhile your energy is scattered across seventeen group chats, four unresolved emotional situations, that one person you haven’t texted back in three months but still think about with guilt every single day, and a truly impres…