You don't have to respond

you really don't

I had a moment of brilliance this week.

After all the people pleasing, after all the stress, I finally realized that you don’t have to respond.

You get to put your energy where you want to put it.

As someone who has been intentionally putting their energy into the things that make them feel whole for the last two years, I can say that this feels different.

We have power over our nervous systems to block out energy that we don’t want to engage with. We have power to tell the energy to wait.

We don’t have to engage with the energy around us in the moment that it calls us. There’s no need to answer the notification right away. I don’t have to call that person back right away, even if there’s a missed call. I don’t have to respond to someone’s words when they speak.

Instead, we can sit with the energy. We can wait until we are ready to let the energy in. We can keep focused where we need to, without distractions.

We don’t have to respond.

We can respond, when we feel ready to take on another stress point in our day or when we finished our task at hand. There’s power in waiting to respond.

We can wait until our thoughts feel good, then respond. We can wait until we’ve asked ourselves if we are ready to engage with the energy, then respond. We can also never respond back because that energy isn’t for us. Maybe it’s for a past self or another day, or lifetime.

We don’t have to engage with everything in life, even when we feel like we should.

And, I’ll tell you why: You don’t owe anyone your energy. You owe it to yourself to maintain your energy. That’s it.

I don’t care who they are or what they did for you, you don’t owe them your energy.

Rather, you owe it to your nervous system to keep it regulated. You’re allowed to take life at your own pace. You don’t need to race around your mind to get answers for everyone. This does not mean that you push everyone away or hide behind your boundaries, rather it means that you can respond at your own pace or simply not respond to energy requests that someone else could respond to.

It’s possible. It’s allowed. It’s manageable.

You don’t have to respond. There’s no obligation. Remember that, and I’ll try to remember that as well.

Thanks for reading my words,

D