Part 3 - The weight: Some Days I Wished I Could Go Back to Not Knowing

Part 3 of 4 in the series "What the Work Did to Me"

"Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor." James Baldwin

I will tell you about a specific kind of tired.

Not the kind that sleep fixes. Not the kind that a weekend away resolves. The kind that lives somewhere deeper - behind your eyes, inside your chest - the kind that follows you into rooms where you're supposed to be relaxed and won't let you fully arrive.

That tired has a name in this field. Compassion fatigue. But when you're living it, you don't reach for the clinical term. You just notice that something in you keeps running on empty no matter how much you rest.

I remember a period - I won't tell you exactly when, because it still feels tender - when I stopped being able to watch certain things.

Films I used to enjoy. News I used to follow. Conversations I used to enter easily. I'd start to engage and then feel something inside me close like a door. Not dramatically. Just quietly, firmly shut.

It wasn't indifference. I wish it had been. Indifference would have been easier. It was the opposite.

I cared so much that my body had started protecting me from the full force of it.

That's what too much awareness without enough rest looks like.

There is a loneliness to this work that nobody fully prepares you for.

Not loneliness like being without people. I had people. But a particular loneliness, the kind you feel when you're in a room full of people having a conversation, and you're watching something they're not seeing, and you know that if you name it, the mood will shift, and people will look at you the way people look at someone who's being difficult.

So you stay quiet. You keep it inside. You carry it home.

And home doesn't always know what to do with it either.

I started noticing a version of myself I didn't love very much.

The version that couldn't just enjoy a film without analyzing the gender dynamics in it. The version that sat in family gatherings and had to hold down responses to things being said around the table that, before the work, I wouldn't have even noticed.

Now I noticed everything, and having to pretend I didn't, for the sake of keeping the peace, had its own quiet cost.

I was still the same person everyone had always known. But I was also someone else now. And those two people had to find a way to share the same body, the same relationships, the same everyday life.

That negotiation is exhausting in a way I still haven't fully found words for.

The other thing nobody tells you is what happens when the work touches your own story.

You can't stand this far outside a topic and not eventually turn and look at your own life through that same lens.

And there are things you find - about choices you made, about dynamics you accepted, about the ways you quietly diminished yourself - that are hard to look at directly.

Not because you're ashamed of who you were. But because understanding is heavy in a way that ignorance never was.

Ignorance is light. You move through it easily. Understanding asks you to stop and feel the full weight of what you now know.

There were moments - and I'm being completely honest with you here - when I wished I could go back.

Not to undo the work. Not to unlearn everything. Just to sit in a room without the lens on. Just to watch something without analyzing it. Just to be a person, not a witness.

To rest from the constant noticing.

But that's the thing about this kind of sight. It doesn't come with an off switch. Once your eyes adjust, the dark looks different. You can't pretend you can't see.

I also carried things that weren't mine to carry.

Stories. Testimonies. Realities that people trusted me enough to share, that I felt responsible enough to hold carefully, and that responsibility has weight.

Real, physical weight.

There were nights I went home with other people's pain sitting in my chest, not knowing how to set it down without feeling like I was abandoning something that deserved to be held.

That's not a complaint. It's just the truth of what this work asks of you.

I think sometimes we romanticize advocacy.

We talk about purpose and passion and making a difference, and all of those things are real, but we don't talk enough about what it costs. What it quietly takes from you over time, in small withdrawals you don't always notice until the account is lower than you expected.

Sometimes it's just that you're tired more often than you used to be. That you need more alone time than people around you understand.

That some conversations hit different than they should, and you don't always have the energy to explain why.

I'm not telling you this to be dark.

I'm telling you this because the weight is part of it. It's not separate from the meaning, it's proof of it. You don't carry things heavily unless you care about them deeply.

And I have never wanted to pretend I carry this lightly. That would be a performance. And Rugo Space has never been the place for that.

The weight is real.

The tiredness is real.

The loneliness of always seeing is real.

And so is the choice to keep going anyway.

That choice - what it looks like, what it costs, what it gives back - is what I will share in the final piece.

Rugo,

A Piece Of My Mind.