06/03/2026
I have never been good at playing dead.
I’m the type with things to do and people to see. When something comes at me — a threat, a slight, a problem with my name on it — every wire in my body says respond. Defend it. Fix it. Get out in front of it.
So it’s been strange, lately, to feel myself going quiet instead.
Not the grief-quiet I’ve written about before. A different kind. The kind where something lands in your lap that absolutely deserves a reaction — and you choose, on purpose, not to give it one. From the inside, it feels like losing.
Then the universe dropped the metaphor right in my lap: the opossum.
When it “plays dead,” it isn’t a performance. Under enough threat, its body takes over and shuts the whole thing down — goes still, stops the fight before the fight can be lost. It looks like surrender. It’s actually the most sophisticated survival strategy in the field. It outlasted the dinosaurs by knowing which battles weren’t worth its body.
That’s not weakness. That’s strategy wearing weakness’s clothes.
And it clicked into the thing I’ve spent my whole career on: the gap between what you intend and what people actually receive.
Under pressure, we don’t lose our strengths — we lean harder into them. Mine is clarity. Decisiveness. Showing up and meeting the moment. Magnetic, when it’s aligned.
But when I react to every single thing that deserves a reaction, my intent — I’m defending what matters — isn’t what lands. What lands is: she’s rattled. She can’t let anything go. My advantage was turning into my distortion, and from the inside it just felt like standing up for myself.
Not reacting is a translation choice. Stillness is louder than the scramble. When you go quiet in the face of something that expected a fight, the room doesn’t read it as defeat. It reads as she didn’t need to.
Time is fixed, but energy is the wild card. And I’d been spending mine on threats that were never going to matter in a month.
So I’m learning to ask, before I respond at all:
Does this actually need my response — or does it just want it?
Going still is not the same as going down.
What are you fighting that you could simply outlast?
