Welcome to the cost of Functioning!
I wish I could give you a beautifully tidy niche statement here. Actually, no. I don’t. They make me itchy.
What I can tell you is why we’re here
👀 What we miss because somebody is still functioning.
🔋 Capacity and why we keep treating it like a character trait instead of something contextual.
🧠 Trauma and chronic stress and the nervous system, but also work, motherhood, relationships, ambition, grief, boundaries, identity, and the genuinely bizarre things we’ve collectively agreed count as normal.
🙋♀️ Why the person who never asks for help gets praised for being independent instead of occasionally being asked why asking feels so expensive.
📥 Why workplaces keep handing more work to the person who handles more work and then seem sincerely surprised when that person develops an eye twitch.
🧯 Why we wait for people to fall apart before we believe the load was heavy.
💬 The stories we tell ourselves because we’re still getting shit done.
There will be science here, and personal stories, and things I learned through trauma work, and things I learned because life apparently enjoys field research. There will be cultural commentary, questions I don’t have neatly packaged answers to, and more than one rant that started because I saw something ridiculous while scrolling my phone.
What there won’t be is any instruction on how to become your highest, most enlightened self. I don’t know who she is, and honestly she sounds exhausting.
Who this is probably for
If you’ve made it this far you likely already know, but specifically:
The one who’s fine at work and gone by six. The one whose childhood was genuinely normal, decent parents, nothing to point at, but still can’t work out why she’s like this. The one carrying something ongoing, an illness or a caregiving situation or a hard season that’s lasted three years, who everybody stopped asking about months ago. And the one who’s already done the work, got the therapy and the books and possibly a diagnosis, and came away with a very good explanation and absolutely no direction.
It’s probably not for you if you want a healing journey, a finish line, an earlier version of yourself to get back to, or someone to help you decide who to blame. I don’t do those, and I’ll be arguing against them fairly regularly.
What you’ll actually get
One essay a week, free. Some of them will name something you’ve been doing for years without a word for it. Some will explain what’s actually happening in your nervous system, properly, without a single crystal involved. And some will be about orientation, which is where you are and what that particular place needs from you. That is where my framework comes in. Four states/terrains, not a ladder. A map.
A few times a year I run a season of live sessions, six weeks, working through one state at a time with whatever people bring into the room. The teaching from those becomes the podcast. Being in the room is for paid subscribers, and I’d rather be upfront about that split: the map is public, where you are is personal.
Start here
Twelve questions, about ninety seconds, and you’ll get a straight answer about which of the four states you’re standing in right now and what it needs from you this week. Free, no email required to see your result.
Who’s writing this
I’m Lauren Tobey. I wrote Spiraling Into Control, I host The Spiral Podcast, and I have degrees in psychology and adult learning, which is a nice way of saying I’ve spent fifteen years figuring out how to teach things to tired adults.
I also spent ten years in a marriage that ran on my ability to absorb things, and came out of it looking for an explanation. What I found was an industry that was excellent at telling me what was wrong with me and useless at telling me what to do about it. Diagnosis after diagnosis, no direction, and underneath all of it a quiet assumption that there was an earlier version of me waiting to be restored.
There wasn’t. There never is. Your nervous system is smart and adaptive, and it moves forward, not backward toward some ideal state that never actually existed.
Maybe you’re handling it beautifully. Maybe nobody else knows how heavy it is. Maybe you haven’t dropped a damn thing.
I believe you. I just think there’s another question worth asking.
What is carrying it costing you?
That’s the conversation I want to have here. Pour something good, pull up a chair.
— Lauren 💜