Reclaiming Beingness
Some losses don’t announce themselves.
They seep in — subtle and silent — until you realize the space you used to occupy has thinned to a thread.
For me, it happened inside the architecture of a career that asked more than it gave.
A workplace where burnout wasn’t a season — it was a system.
Where survival became the standard.
And somewhere in those years, I began to trade presence for performance.
To numb beingness with doingness.
To become small enough to fit what the room would tolerate.
Until the day I couldn’t anymore.
Leaving that environment wasn’t the solution.
It was the start of the work.
Because here’s what no one tells you about recovering from spaces that demanded your nervous system to live on high alert:
The body doesn’t reset on command.
The mind doesn’t unlearn patterns overnight.
And presence doesn’t return just because the calendar says “new role.”
In those first weeks of my career reset, I met every new moment with old wiring:
→ If I made a mistake, would I be written off?
→ If I set a boundary, would I be punished?
→ If I took up space, would I be seen as “too much?”
→ And if I stayed small, would I be safe?
Exhausting questions.
Outdated questions.
But honest ones — wired into the body through repetition and survival.
Here’s what I know now:
Presence isn’t a light switch. It’s a practice.
One breath. One boundary. One moment of self-trust at a time.
And reclaiming beingness isn’t about performing a new identity.
It’s about remembering the parts of you that never needed the old one.
For me, that meant rebuilding presence with small anchors:
→ Honoring when my body said no.
→ Owning when I needed repair, not performance.
→ Re-learning how to hold space for myself — not just for others.
It’s not linear.
It’s not polished.
And it’s not about achieving perfection in “healing.”
It’s about choosing — again and again — to take up space as the full human I am.
Not the flattened version a system once demanded.
That is the work.
And it asks to be chosen — again and again — without finish line or applause.
This piece is part of The Edit — presence-first leadership narratives from The Co.
