Pregnancy has stripped away my illusions of control. My body is loud right now. It reacts quickly, holds onto stress, demands rest whether I agree with it or not. Fatigue is no longer subtle. It is decisive. There is no negotiating with a nervous system that is already carrying more than its share.
My mind, however, has not softened. I am still extreme by nature. I do not aspire to average or gentle improvement. I want depth, intensity, excellence. I want to do things fully or not at all. Pregnancy has not erased that drive. It has only put it in direct conflict with my physical limits.
That conflict is exhausting in its own way. A body asking for slowness. A mind that refuses mediocrity. Rest feels suspicious to a personality wired for momentum. Stillness feels like losing ground.
For a long time, I have resisted rest and I still do. I try to extract the maximum amount of life from each day, to press every hour for meaning, progress, output. Even when my body pushes back, my instinct is to bargain with it, to squeeze a little more out before I stop. Rest is not yet something I embrace. It is something I wrestle with.
This isn’t new. I have always lived at the edges. Even when I was a heroin addict, I did nothing quietly or ordinarily. I wanted my suffering to be total, consuming, unmistakable. I didn’t just fall apart. I plunged. Extremes have always felt more honest to me than moderation, even when they were destroying me.
But pregnancy is not interested in my mythology. My body is forcing the question my mind keeps dodging: what if rest is not mediocrity? What if it is the one discipline I have never wanted to master?
I am still trying to get the most juice out of each day. I am still resistant. But I am being pressed into a reckoning. Not about ambition, but about limits. And whether refusing to be ordinary also means learning how to stop.
B🤍
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