There's a cost to being self aware that no one really talks about.
Ya know people praise self awareness like it's this upgrade, like once you have it everything gets lighter, clearer, easier.
It doesn't, in a lot of ways it gets heavier.
Because once you become self aware you don't get the comfort of ignorance anymore. You start seeing patterns that you used to live inside without noticing. You catch yourself mid-reaction, mid-excuse, mid-avoidance and that changes things.
You don't get to blame everything on circumstance, you don't get to say, that's just how I am and feel clean and peaceful about it. You see where you contribute, where you pull away, where you stay silent. Where you chose comfort over honesty and sometimes that awareness doesn't lead to immediate change, it just sits there watching.
You start noticing how often you bite your tongue, how often you could speak up but choose peace instead.
How often you understand someone's behavior even when it hurts you. And that understanding, that's where it gets lonely, because when you're self aware, you don't get the same relief from being reactive, you don't get the same satisfaction from exploding, you don't get to play the victim without feeling it in your chest afterward. You see too much, you see why people do what they do.
You see where pain comes from, you see the fear underneath the behavior. And that makes it harder to walk away cleanly, harder to be dramatic, harder to be careless, you start carrying responsibility, even when no one asked you to.
There is also this quiet grief that it comes with. You realize, you know, how many conversations could have gone differently, how many situations you handled poorly before you knew better.
How many versions of yourself you don't fully recognize anymore. And you don't get to undo that, self awareness doesn't erase the past, it just makes you more conscious of it.
It forces you to slow down, to pause, to choose your words carefully and sometimes, sometimes that restraint feels exhausting, because reacting would be easier. Blaming, would be lighter, not knowing would be comfortable. But you know now, and knowing changes the rules. You don't get to unsee your patterns, you don't get to unlearn your triggers. You don't get to pretend your actions don't have weight.

spilltheteapotography Art: Ahad