The Tremor Within

Internal tremors are invitations — not warnings

Tremors are not warnings.

They are invitations.

Each tremor arrives quietly, without urgency, without explanation. The instinct is to manage it, label it, or neutralize it—to translate movement into something safe and temporary. I did this for a long time. I treated tremors as disturbances instead of signals, as inconveniences rather than instructions.

Control felt responsible. Stability felt mature.

But the tremors didn’t disappear. They repeated. And repetition has a language of its own.

I learned that the danger was not in the tremor itself, but in the effort to suppress it. Each time I contained movement, growth did not stop—it was postponed. When movement finally became unavoidable, it arrived heavier, later, and with fewer options than it would have before. Some paths closed quietly while I was trying to stay composed. I didn’t notice them disappearing. I noticed only when they were no longer available.

Suppressing the tremor reshaped my identity. I became someone who valued composure over accuracy, restraint over responsiveness. Stability turned into a role I performed, not a state I inhabited. I mistook suppression for discipline and control for safety.

Eventually, ignoring the tremor stopped being neutral.

There came a moment when I could no longer justify waiting. The version of “being stable” I had been defending depended on permission—on invitations that made movement feel safe. It required everything to align before action could occur. I recognized it for what it was: caution disguised as responsibility.

Stepping into the tremor did not feel brave. It felt destabilizing. Structure loosened. Certainty cracked. A version of myself built on containment and predictability did not survive the movement.

What followed was not empowerment. It was accuracy.

The coherence that replaced control did not come from holding things together, but from seeing them clearly. I stopped managing my surroundings and started reading them. Forward movement became possible not because I eliminated risk, but because I stopped pretending risk could be avoided.

Being responsible without risk was the last version of stability I had to abandon. I could no longer call caution maturity when it was costing me movement. From that point on, responsibility without risk stopped being an option I could justify to myself.

The tremor was never the threat.

Waiting was.