You are not broken. You are protected.

Do you want something so deeply and still not able to make yourself do it?

To wake up with a plan, a goal, a genuine desire to move forward and then watch yourself, almost in slow motion, choose the easier thing instead. Hit snooze. Close the laptop. Open social media. Tell yourself you will start tomorrow. And then feel the quiet shame of having done it again.

I know that feeling. I have lived inside it for long stretches of my life. And for a long time, I called it laziness. Lack of discipline. Not wanting it badly enough. I stacked it on top of everything else I was already carrying and told myself I was the problem.

But I had it wrong. The part of me that kept stopping was not broken. It was doing exactly what it had been built to do. And until I understood that, I kept crashing into the same wall, wondering why it would not move.

“You do not need to break the wall. You just need to learn how to fly over it.”

I have a shelf of journals and planners that I barely opened after I bought them. I had a gym membership for over a year and went consistently for exactly three months. I have started painting more times than I can count, only to find myself forty minutes later scrolling through social media because I needed a five-minute break that turned into the whole evening.

And every time, I told myself the same thing: why can I not just do the thing?

I am someone who believes deeply in accountability. I do not like excuses and I do not like staying stuck. But the more I confronted this pattern honestly, the more I realised that accountability alone was not the answer because I was already holding myself accountable. I already knew what I wanted. I already had the plan. The gap was not between knowing and planning. It was between planning and actually allowing myself to move.

Something inside me kept pulling me back. And it was not random. It was precise. It knew exactly which past failure to surface, exactly which fear to amplify, exactly which memory to bring back at the moment I was about to step forward. It felt like fighting a version of myself that was smarter than me. Because in many ways, it was.

I used to call that part of me my inner critic. But that name never quite felt right because a critic just tears things down. What this part of me was doing was more sophisticated than that. It was protecting me. Keeping me away from anything that felt too close to the experiences that had already hurt me. The bullying. The uncertainty. The moments when I tried and it went wrong and I had to carry that in public.

My inner critic had been present for all of it. It had watched, recorded, learned. And it had made a very clear decision: we are not doing that again.

So every time I moved toward something that mattered: a project, a dream, a version of myself that felt real — it showed up. Not to destroy me. To save me, in the only way it knew how.

The problem was not that my inner critic existed. The problem was that it had been built for survival, not for thriving. Its only job is to keep me here, breathing, in one piece, for one more day. It was never designed to help me build a life I love. That was never its intent.

And once I understood that, once I stopped treating it as a saboteur and started treating it as an extraordinarily intelligent, deeply scared part of me doing its best — something shifted.

Before we go further, I want to ask you this: think about the last time you stopped yourself just before something that mattered. What did the voice say? Not the surface reason — the real one. What was it actually afraid of? You do not need to fix it right now. Just name it. Because everything that follows only works if you bring your honest answer to it.

When you notice yourself pulling back, stalling, scrolling, doing anything but the thing — that is not evidence that you are lazy or broken or not meant for this. It is evidence that something inside you is afraid, and trying to keep you safe. Recognising it as protection rather than failure changes the entire conversation you are able to have with yourself.

What is the fear underneath your most familiar form of self-sabotage? Not the behaviour — the fear.

Trying to override your inner critic through willpower alone is like trying to shout over someone who is genuinely frightened. It does not work, and it exhausts you. What it needs is not to be overpowered but to be heard. Acknowledged. Told: I know you are trying to protect me. I know what happened before. And I am choosing to take one small step anyway.

Not a leap. Just a step. What would that step be today?

One of the things that genuinely changed how I move is letting go of the idea that progress has to look significant. Opening an empty document and writing one sentence is progress. Sitting at your desk and brainstorming for ten minutes is progress. The size of the action matters far less than the message it sends to the part of you that is watching: I am not asking you to be fearless. I am just asking you to come with me this far.

What is the smallest possible version of the thing you keep putting off?

I reached a point where I was simply too tired to keep fighting myself. Too tired to keep strategising around my own resistance. And in that tiredness, something useful appeared: I stopped needing the wall to come down. I decided to see it, acknowledge it, and move forward anyway — not through it, not around it, but over it. Without knowing exactly where I would land. Without a guarantee that I would land well. Just the quiet trust that I would figure it out when I got there.

That is not recklessness. That is a different kind of courage, the kind that does not need certainty to move.

Is there a wall you have been trying to break for a long time? What would it feel like to simply fly over it instead?

Your inner critic wants evidence before it lets you proceed. Evidence that it will be safe. That it will not hurt. That you will not end up back in the place you were trying to escape. And sometimes you simply cannot give it that evidence in advance. The proof it is looking for often only exists on the other side of the step you are afraid to take.

You do not have to have all the answers before you begin. You just have to begin.

What do you think she knows — the version of you who already moved?

Be gentle with yourself about this. Self-sabotage is not a character flaw. It is an intelligent system that was built during harder times, doing its best with what it has. You are not fighting yourself. You are in dialogue with yourself. And the more patiently and honestly you can hold that dialogue, the more room you create for the things you actually want to grow.

The wall does not have to fall. You just have to decide to fly.

With love,

Fatmata

SheGetsTo