The Trading Agent

Anyone else wear their exhaustion like a medal at one point? Anyone else mistake exhaustion for dedication?
You know, busting your ass of to be something others think you should be or living a vision that you mind continues to think will make you happy, but same s**t different day?
Every burnout cycle, I’d tell myself: “This is what it takes. This is the price of success.”
Sometimes I’d hit the goal. Sometimes I’d learn something valuable.
But most of the time? I was pouring everything I had into something that didn’t even feel like mine.
I was grinding on someone else’s dream, following someone else’s blueprint, chasing someone else’s definition of “making it.”
And it felt like I was draining out my soul, one “fake it til you make it” at a time.
The weird part? I thought this was normal. I thought everyone felt this hollow. I thought the emptiness meant I just wasn’t pushing hard enough.
But what if the problem wasn’t that I wasn’t trying hard enough?
What if the problem was that I was trying so hard to be something I wasn’t, that I forgot to ask if it was even what I wanted?
Just a thought I’ve been sitting with lately and it’s been one of the most liberating places to sit in because as soon as I stopped chasing, it all came to me and effort didn’t feel like exhaustion - it felt rewarding!

The Shadow of Forgetting
I once forgot myself completely to hold onto a relationship that didn’t fit.
We both did.
Two people, each abandoning who they were, trying to mold into shapes that would make it work. We weren’t in love with each other, we were in love with not being alone.
So we stayed and we suffered.
Not because we were bad people or wrong for each other in some dramatic way. We suffered because we had forgotten who we were. And when you forget yourself, you can’t truly connect with anyone else. You’re just two strangers, playing roles, hoping the performance will eventually feel real.
It never does.
We spend our lives chasing desires we inherited, ambitions that aren’t ours, dreams programmed into us, identities borrowed from other people’s beliefs.
The exhausting cycle of becoming “more” when the only thing we’ve forgotten is who we already are.
What if the deepest desire isn’t to become something new? What if it’s simply to remember?
When you remember who you truly are, beyond the programming, beyond the borrowed beliefs ——something shifts.
The chasing stops. The striving softens, and somehow, what you need begins to find you.
You stop trying to be someone you’re not. You start attracting what aligns with who you’ve always been.
The question isn’t “What do I want to become?”
It’s “Who was I before the world told me who to be?”
The hardest relationships aren’t the ones that end badly, they’re the ones where you lose yourself slowly, so quietly you don’t even notice until you’re already gone.
Remember when you felt alive, free, and the world was easy? What happens if you never leave? What would happen if you choose yourself?