I Spent Two Years Trying to Get Better at Coping. I Never Asked What I Was Coping With.
For about two years, my entire personal project was getting better at coping — better sleep, better breathing techniques, better ways to manage the tightness I carried around most days. I got genuinely good at coping. The tightness never actually went anywhere. What "Getting Better at Coping" Quietly Assumed It assumed the thing I was coping with was fixed, permanent, just a fact of life to be managed rather than something with an actual source that might be examined and changed. Coping skills are built for exactly that assumption, and I never once questioned it. Why I Never Asked the Obvious Question Getting better at coping felt like real progress — visible, measurable, something I could point to. Asking what I was actually coping with felt like it might open something bigger and less manageable, so I kept refining the coping instead, which was the more comfortable place to put two years of effort. What Finally Forced the Question A coping technique that had reliably worked for a year suddenly stopped working, with no warning, and for the first time I had to ask why — not how to cope with the tightness better, but what the tightness had actually been about the entire time. What I Found When I Finally Asked It wasn't one diffuse, permanent condition. It was a specific, repeating pattern — a particular kind of situation that reliably produced the tightness, showing up in slightly different clothes every time, that I'd been managing symptomatically for two years without ever once looking directly at it.
Meet Ori — built to help you find what you're actually coping with, since better coping skills were never going to ask that question for you.
Part of The Recognition Library →
Momar Lissa Ndiaye ("MLN") is the Founder & CEO of weyoga Inc., a Delaware company. — weyoga.ai · mln@weyoga.ai
This is an illustrative composite, not a real member account.