When You Are Afraid to Stop Because Stopping Was Never Safe

by Rebecca Bloom

Stillness is not simple for people who grew up in unsafe emotional environments. Stopping meant being noticed. Stopping meant being questioned. Stopping meant becoming visible in ways that felt threatening. I learned early that movement was safer than stillness. Keep going. Keep helping. Keep anticipating. Keep busy enough that no one asks what is wrong.

So even now, when my body needs rest, fear rises. Not loud fear. Quiet fear. The kind that sits at the bottom of the stomach and whispers that stopping is dangerous. That slowing down might lead to pain. That stillness is unsafe.

My body asks to stop. My mind refuses. It remembers childhood rules more clearly than it remembers childhood comfort.

The first time illness forced me to stop, I panicked. I felt exposed. I felt vulnerable. I felt like the world could collapse because I was not holding everything together. Rest did not feel like rest. It felt like waiting for something bad to happen.

But slowly, gently, I am learning something different. Stopping now does not mean the same thing it meant then. It is not a trap. It is not a threat. It is not the beginning of being punished or ignored. It is simply a pause. A moment where my body and my feelings are allowed to exist without performance.

Sometimes my chest tightens when I sit down. Sometimes guilt rises before comfort does. Sometimes the old panic flickers like it used to. But I breathe through it. I remind myself I am not that child anymore. The world around me is not the one I grew up in. I am safe enough now to stop.

Stopping does not mean losing control. Stopping does not mean danger. Stopping is simply choosing to honour the body that carried me through years of hurt. It is choosing myself. Something I never learned to do when I was young.

And the more I practise it, the safer it becomes.

Rebecca Bloom