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 vagus nerve just looked at your attention distribution and filed for bankruptcy. Your adrenals submitted a formal request for a sabbatical. And somewhere in your pelvic bowl, the part of you that actually generates life force is like “I could give you so much more if you’d stop leaking me out to everyone who makes eye contact with you.”

Here’s what nobody tells you about “energy management” (and I’m using that phrase loosely because most energy management advice is just productivity culture wearing a crystal): You’re not tired because you’re doing too much. You’re tired because your attention is in nine thousand places simultaneously and none of those places is HERE, in your actual body, where your actual life is happening.

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This essay grew up and moved out. It lives in Flesh & Frequency: The Feral Science of Your Body’s Built-In Intelligence now.

The full text is in print. A book with a spine, a cover, and a body that holds the whole thing.