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Confession: I hate running. But three times a week, I drag myself out of bed, forcing myself to do something that’s supposed to count as “self-care.” If I’m honest, what’s pressing isn’t my wellbeing—it’s the stubborn, rapidly expanding roll at my waistline. My deal with myself: do the hard thing first, wage war on the soft siege.
For months, I took my phone along. I had a watch—I didn’t need a phone—but I’d become that woman, turning a jog into content, angling for the perfect glow, hoping the morning light would cast me as an early-morning-natural-light-goddess. Sigh.
Lately, every photo comes with a gnawing question: Who is this for? Am I inviting others into my joy, or proving I have some?
Here’s what I didn’t expect: every time I stopped to capture the moment, I suffocated whatever shift was trying to happen, compressing it into bite-sized evidence instead of letting it unfold.
The panic, presence, and revelation
One morning, in an instance of either clarity or madness, I left the phone at home.
The second I stepped outside, panic set in—sharp and immediate. Like that stomach-flip before travel, convinced you’ve forgotten your passport. Who was I, without a witness? Without validation?
Here’s the embarrassing part: I felt completely starkers. My hand kept darting to my pocket for the phantom device. I was on the street at 6 a.m., looking like a phone-withdrawal lunatic.
What if the light’s perfect? What if I collapse and no one finds me?
I’ve survived decades without a tracking device, but now I was terrified of a thirty-minute jog around a nature reserve I’ve circled 847 times.
That’s when I got properly annoyed with myself. “Oh for crying out loud, Lisa. Pack your bollocks and get on with it.”
So I ran. Not out of zen wisdom, but pure irritation.
After a mile, the thought dropped in: that panic revealed something I wasn’t ready to see. I wasn’t capturing my joy; I was compressing every instance of growth into evidence that evolution was occurring.
But compression kills growth. We flatten the richness of unfolding into a highlight reel—something to show, not to feel.
What compression of joy steals
Without my device, my senses unfurled. The sun rose slowly. Mist draped the trees like a veil. Cows blurred into soft smudges. Birds splashed color across the sky. The whole scene was a living painting, and I was part of it.
There was no photo. Only me, breathless, letting the experience slip away.
And in that slipping, something else happened: I felt myself reconnecting. Not the performative kind of shift, but the cellular kind. The kind that happens when you’re fully present, not curating proof.
This is what we lose with editing down: the spaciousness to come home to ourselves. The messy, unwitnessed moments where we remember who we are. The private victories that rewire us but don’t translate to content.
The exhausting performance of becoming
I came home proud, not for burning calories or outpacing my last run, but because I’d managed, for half an hour, to stop performing my growth.
Because that’s what we’re doing, isn’t it? Especially in midlife, when we’re trying to reconnect with ourselves. Hungry for validation, we simplify every breakthrough into a shareable instant.
The irony: the more we capture the homecoming, the less we experience it.
Now, most mornings, I leave the device behind. Not always. (Let’s be honest, last Monday I took seventeen sunrise photos because “the light was different.” Old habits die hard.)
But the mornings I go phone-free stick. I can still see the mist wrapping that oak tree three weeks ago. I have seventeen photos of last week’s sunrise and couldn’t tell you how a single one felt.
The question beneath
Here’s what’s most unsettling: underneath the need for validation is a sense of fading into the background of my own life.
I want my growth to matter, but I don’t even know who I want it to matter to. Maybe that’s why I reach for my device, trying to flatten the complexity of reconnecting with myself into evidence, something witnessed.
But the more I shrink, the less I inhabit. And if I’m not inhabiting my own evolution, who is?
That’s the question that keeps me up at night: How much of my own journey am I missing because I’m too busy proving it’s happening?
Paid Subscribers: Inside the paid section, I’m sharing The Reconnection Audit—the framework that helped me see the difference between instances I was truly present and moments I was just performing. Plus the real discovery: why our most profound experiences can’t be captured and why that’s exactly what makes them powerful.
The twist? The experiences we try hardest to preserve are often the ones that preserve us least.