In other words
Karen Restivo
There is a particular kind of exhaustion that comes not from doing too much, but from fighting too hard.
Fighting circumstances. Fighting feelings. Fighting the version of life that showed up instead of the one we ordered.
We grip the plan. We brace against the outcome. And the harder we push, the more immovable it all becomes.
Professor and author Joseph Campbell understood this when he said, “We must be willing to let go of the life we have planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us.”
Not the life we settled for.
Not the life we survived.
The life that was waiting - patient, purposeful, and impossibly better than the one we were white –
knuckling our way toward.
Spiritual teacher and bestselling author Eckhart Tolle named the mechanism behind it, “Whatever you fight, you strengthen, and what you resist, persists.” Read that again slowly. What you resist, persists. The anxiety you refuse to feel grows louder.
The belief you deny having runs deeper.
The grief you outrun finds another road.
Resistance does not protect us from difficult things - it locks us in a room with them.
The solution to a persistent struggle is not more force.
It is acceptance and awareness.
This is where many of us pause, because acceptance has been misunderstood.
Accepting a feeling or circumstance does not mean you approve of it. It does not mean you are giving up, giving in, or declaring defeat.
It simply means you acknowledge its presence - you stop arguing with reality long enough to see it clearly. And, in that moment of clear seeing, something extraordinary happens.
The resistance loses its power. The grip loosens.
And what once felt immovable begins, quietly, to shift.
Self-destructive beliefs operate the same way.
The belief that you are not enough, not ready, not worthy - these do not dissolve through willpower or positive thinking alone. They dissolve through honest, compassionate acknowledgment.
I see you. I know where you came from. And I am no longer willing to let you lead.
Surrender is not weakness. It is the most courageous act of self-awareness available to us.
It is the moment we stop spending energy on what we cannot control and redirect it toward who we are becoming.
Acceptance is the open hand where resistance was the closed fist. One exhausts you. The other sets you free.
The life Campbell spoke of - the one that is waiting for you - cannot find you while you are braced against the door.
It requires you to step back, breathe, and allow.
In other words, the breakthrough you have been forcing may be one surrender away.
Karenrestivo57@gmail.com