Not Everything Is a Discipline Problem

Relational capacity, moralizing symptoms, and why I needed to go back to sleep

I spent three weeks drafting an apology letter to my community for not showing up better. The whole time, I should have just called my doctor.

A few weeks ago, I started writing an essay about guilt. I was having a hard time showing up, I was slow to respond to texts, I was dropping out of birthday parties and my writing group and seeing my friends. I was wrestling with something that didn’t make any sense to me: if community is the sun my world revolves around, why was I suddenly so okay with just.. sitting in the dark? Drawing the blinds?

After managing to drag myself to my first Wednesday Walk in weeks (normally a consistent routine with my girlfriends), I was complaining to my very attuned and very direct friend Amber about my exhaustion, how I was sleeping 10 hours a night in a way that felt like a 20 minute nap, the way the tiredness had sunk into my bones, and she gently said “why not get it checked out? Get blood work done?”

Oh. Right.

Two days later I had answers. My thyroid wasn’t working like it should be. It wasn’t just about failing my community. My internal systems were failing me.

So I had spent weeks solving for the wrong problem.

But my medical issues just highlighted another important layer to the conversation about showing up for community: how often we try to become better versions of ourselves, when what we actually need is to listen to the version of ourselves that’s here now.

I was moralizing my symptoms. And don’t so many of us do this? Depression becomes “I’m lazy.” Burnout? “I’m not motivated.” ADHD? “I’m not reliable.” Chronic illness? “I’m not trying hard enough.”

There were days (and more days) when I was lying on my couch with the laptop burning my thighs, staring at the number of unread messages ticking up on whatsapp like they were a pile of unwashed gym clothes.

I felt a specific, heavy kind of shame. My internal monologue wasn’t “I am tired”; it was “I am failing.”

I was certain that my silence was evidence of a character flaw: a slow-motion backslide into avoidance when I’d worked so hard in therapy to show up differently. I convinced myself that I was becoming the very thing I write against: a person who treats community as a thought exercise, not a practice. I saw the IG posts. “You can not practice relational skills isolated from other people.” “Community isn’t a solo project.” And the shame built.

I looked at my reflection and didn’t see a woman who needed a lab draw; I saw a woman who was “quiet-quitting” her friendships. Someone who needed to will herself into a better version of who she was, because I knew I WANTED to be there.

So, I did what I do best: I started overthinking.

I spent hours trying to write an essay about community. About how maybe I just need to try harder. About the importance of relational discipline, a whole thesis on how to be a better person for everyone else while I was barely a person for myself. I was trying to articulate instructions on how to “show up” when you don’t feel like it. I thought if I could just write a smart enough framework for interdependence, I could earn my way back into the village I was building (which, frankly, probably hadn’t even noticed I had left).

I spent hours... burning the fuel I didn’t have to explain why I didn’t have any fuel. Essentially, I was running an intellectual Ponzi scheme.

Two friends read the essay first. And the feedback (kindly) boiled down to “I’m a little confused.” I was “spiraling and justifying in tandem” (which is excellent feedback, to be fair). I was making good points, but something wasn’t adding up.

Of course it wasn’t. Nothing about how I felt was adding up to me. I was sitting here asking out loud “what is wrong with me?” and I decided it must be that I wasn’t working as hard as I could be.

How often do we mistake a physiological SOS for a moral deficiency? We’re collectively obsessed with “character development” and “becoming our best selves,” and yet we live under the crushing demands of being bundles of muscles and bones and electrical signals just moving through a capitalist nightmare. I was ready to resign myself to my personality flaws instead of admitting something simpler: I am a body. And my body was struggling.

What kind of community are we building if the first place our minds go when we’re struggling isn’t “Am I okay?” but “Am I a bad person?”

Let’s be real about how we got here: we’ve built a culture that treats ‘wellness’ as a moral achievement and ‘illness’ as a lack of discipline. And we have become so obsessed with relational skills that we’ve forgotten relational capacity.

To be fair, there IS a seductive comfort in a character flaw. If I am ‘avoidant’ or ‘lazy,’ I have a roadmap. I can buy a new planner, hire a coach, or find a whiteboard to map out a better version of my personality. A character flaw is something I can discipline my way out of: a project I can manage. A diagnosis, however, meant I couldn’t just ‘try harder.’ It meant my ‘will’ was irrelevant.

Even though I spent weeks calculating my relational debt and writing that essay to justify it, the reality is, when I sat in front of Nik, asking if I should just force myself to get up and go to the birthday party after I crashed into a two hour nap at 5pm, he didn’t ask for a framework. He just looked at me, saw the gray tinge in my skin and the way I was propping myself up against the cushions on the couch, and said:

“Go back to sleep.”

It was the most frustratingly simple piece of “Relational Futurism” I’d ever heard.

I had been trying to solve for the community’s needs before I had even acknowledged my own. I thought they needed me to be a “good community member” with “relational discipline.” They just needed me to be an actual person and take care of myself before I could do any of that.

Safety in community might start here: you don’t always have to earn your place back. You just have to tell the truth about where you are.