Doing well on the outside, struggling on the inside

Many of us are doing well on the outside but struggling, quietly, on the inside. We do not quite know what to do because nothing looks broken enough to justify how tired we actually feel, writes counsellor Faith Foo.

A few years ago, a man sat across from me in a session, and I still think about him. Sharp mind. The kind of person who could walk into a room and command it without trying.

But his body would not cooperate. Everything he ate, he threw up. His hands shook slightly while his posture stayed composed, the way a person holds a tray steady even as their arms are giving out.

That contradiction has never left me. Someone can be competent, admired and capable, yet still carry something too heavy to hold alone. You would not know it to look at him. Most people would not know it to look at themselves either.

I think many of us are living some version of that gap. Doing well on the outside. Struggling, quietly, on the inside. And not knowing what to do with that because nothing looks broken enough to justify how tired we actually feel.

As a counsellor trained in eye movement desensitisation and reprocessing (EMDR), I spend my days with people who function at a high level and still wake up with dread they cannot explain. A founder who cannot begin the one project they actually want to do. A leader whose whole body tightens when someone gives her a compliment, as if praise were a trap rather than a gift. A client who realised, mid-sentence, that the heaviness she felt every morning was not laziness. It was grief for a version of herself she had quietly set aside to keep functioning.

These are not signs of weakness so much as what a nervous system does when it has spent a long time asking, am I safe or am I in danger, and never quite gets a clear answer. The body keeps score long after the mind has moved on. It learns to brace, overthink, please people and avoid rest because, at some point, those things kept it safe. The trouble is, the nervous system does not always update itself just because the danger has passed. It keeps doing what worked once, even after it is no longer necessary.

I know this gap personally, not only professionally. I have built a practice, written books, sat across from senior leaders and helped them come undone and put themselves back together, yet there are still mornings when I feel like the earlier version of myself who never quite finished catching up. Knowing something and living it are not the same thing. I have to remind myself of that more often than I would like to admit.

What I have noticed, in myself and in the people I sit with, is that the moment things start to shift is rarely dramatic. It is not a single breakthrough. It is smaller than that.

A woman I worked with told me that around week five, she caught herself about to spiral into her usual fixing mode, and instead, she just did not. She stood still. She let herself feel uncertain without rushing to manage it away.

“I’m proud of myself,” she told me. Not for handling it perfectly. For not running.

That is what change actually looks like, most of the time. Small. Almost boring, even. A pause that used to be impossible.

I wrote about this gap at length in a book called SPARK in the middle of this year. I wrote it because I was tired of only saying this in a room with the door shut, one person at a time. And, if I am honest, because I needed it written down somewhere I could go back and read on the mornings I forget it applies to me too.

One thing that has stayed with me since is how many people – not clients, not colleagues, just readers I have never met – have told me some version of the same story. One woman wrote that the question alone – are you doing well on the outside but quietly struggling inside? – stopped her in her tracks because it described almost exactly how she had been feeling. She said it was the first time in a long time she had felt truly seen.

I do not think she needed the book to tell her something new. She needed permission to trust what she already knew.

If there is one thing I would want someone to take from all this, it is a small piece of permission. The tightness in your chest before a meeting you have done a hundred times before. The guilt that shows up exactly when you need rest the most. The heaviness some mornings that has no clear cause. All of it is information – a body that has been doing the impossible for a long time, quietly, without complaint, finally asking to be noticed.

You do not have to earn the right to feel tired, or wait until you collapse before you are allowed to stop.

That man in my office, the one whose body would not let him eat, is doing well now. He did not push through it, in the end. Somewhere along the way, his body just started believing it was safe enough to stop bracing.

I think about him whenever I catch myself doing the same thing he did. Holding the tray steady. Arms giving out underneath.

Some mornings, I still have to put it down myself.

The views expressed here are the personal opinion of the writer and do not represent that of Twentytwo13.