You Say You Don’t Care…But You Definitely Do
What if you stopped managing everyone’s feelings and started listening to your own?
What if you cared... less?
I’m three weeks out from the Hoffman Process. One day I’ll write about it in full. Right now, I’m still digesting. If you don’t know what it is, check this out. Long story short: it was the most important and most brutal thing I’ve ever done. I will never be the same, and that’s the point. It was adult emotional bootcamp meets soul excavation. 9 Days. Zero distractions. No phone. No performing. Just me, a bunch of strangers (who are now my family), our negative patterns, and the parts of ourselves we’ve spent decades trying to outrun.
Since coming back, I feel like someone vacuumed out all the noise in my head. I’m left with this very strange thing I didn’t realize I’d been missing: spaciousness. A kind of emptiness, that’s scary for me. Room to breathe. Room to feel. Room to not default to control every time something feels uncertain…l'horreur!
For most of my life, I’ve been under the illusion that my control, my structure, my discipline, my rigor, was a personality trait, and keeping me safe. Turns out, it was just keeping me distracted. I thought my hypervigilance and maniacal focus was a part of my identify. It wasn’t. It was a trauma response. It was survival…Thanks Mom & Dad!
What has been mind blowing is I am no longer surviving in the same way. I feel like a teenager again. Not in the “fuck you for no reason” way, but in the “oh shit, who am I without all these layers?” way.
And to my greatest surprise, without all that armor, I’m finding I care so much less.
The Art of Caring Less
We love to say we don’t care what people think. It’s all over Instagram captions, TikToks, and the occasional post-therapy breakthrough: “I don’t care anymore!!”
Sure you don’t.
The truth is, most of us care….a lot. I did. I contorted my entire life around the anticipation of someone else’s unpredictable reaction (again, thanks Mom & Dad!). I pre-rejected myself just to avoid being surprised by it.
And for years, I fought that truth. I doubled down on structure, obession, performance, anything to “avoid” being misunderstood. But the reality was simple: My controlling tendencies weren’t protecting me. They were harming me.
What I needed wasn’t to care more. I needed to care less.
And let me be clear, caring less isn’t about being numb, or cold, or above it all.
It’s about seeing the opinion, hearing the judgment, noticing the projection, and choosing not to carry it.
I used to think I had to preempt every misunderstanding. To explain myself before anyone could question me. To control every room, every conversation, every tone shift.
Now?
I’m letting people be wrong about me. And I’m accepting I’m wrong about them, too.
And do you know what that feels like!? Liberation. The kind I’ve been chasing my entire life.
Letting People Not “Get It”
I’m letting people make their assumptions. I’m letting someone think what they want without spiraling into “how do I fix this?” Because I know now, deeply, that I can’t “fix” or carry anyone else’s emotions. I’m no longer shape-shifting to make other people more comfortable. And honestly? That’s fucking freedom.
I’ve had to ask myself: What if you stopped letting someone’s distorted version of you shape how you move through the world? What if you stopped managing their discomfort at the cost of your peace?
That’s what I’m practicing now. And I repeat, it is a practice. My nervous system still wants to jump in, to smooth it all out, to over-explain, overperform, overcorrect. But every time, I’m choosing to care less. On purpose.
Caring less about being perfectly understood.
Caring less about being palatable.
Caring less about winning the invisible productivity contest.
We’ve been sold so many lies about what makes us valuable, metrics, milestones, marketability. We’ve been trained to shrink, tweak, and package ourselves into whatever version makes other people feel most at ease.
But what if we stopped trying to be digestible? What if we stopped optimizing and just... were?
I Am Many Things At Once
I can care enormously about equity, about community, about connection. And I can also care way less about bullshit. I care less about proving myself. I care less about constantly performing worthiness.
So no, this isn’t about “not caring”.”
This is about caring less about the wrong things...
And more about the right ones.
You don’t need to care your way into belonging.
You already belong.
I’ve been over hustle culture for a while. But this is something deeper.
This is about unlearning the part of me that believed if I just did everything right, maybe I’d finally feel safe.
But I am safe.
I’m so fine.
I belong. And so do you.
Join me in the Care Less Club.
There’s plenty of room.
