progress limps

Progress doesn’t stride. It limps.

It falters under the weight of history, of needs unmet, of truths carried quietly—of injustices we may never see made right.

It limps because we’ve been wounded—and because we keep wounding each other in the very places we came to heal.

I’ve noticed a pattern. Those on the edge of change—the doers, the advocates, the awake and aware—often turn on each other first. Unfairly. Sometimes, harshly.

It rarely begins with cruelty. It begins with pain.

Because progress isn’t just structural. It’s psychological. It’s relational. And like all real healing, the threshold of change stirs the feelings we were taught to bury: grief, rage, mistrust, fear of abandonment.

And when we can’t direct our feelings where they belong, we launch them where they don’t.

We say we want something new—but we carry the logic of the old world in our bodies.

And so we unravel.

We lose faith in the very spaces we helped build. We treat the kind workplace—the one that finally feels safe—as the stage to release years of what we’ve held in.

We sabotage the good. We echo the very forces we hoped to escape.

We project past harm onto whoever happens to trigger it first—saying what’s long been unsaid, even if it’s not meant for them.

We speak with conviction—but not always with care. We name the wound—but not always the source.

And then we wonder why the thing we built doesn’t hold.

We turn on our allies.

And when it’s our turn to need someone in our corner—only silence answers. Because everyone knows: only harm follows for them.

But this isn’t failure. It’s a threshold.

We’re learning what it means to be near power without becoming what hurt us.
We’re learning how to be held without falling apart—or reaching for control.
We’re learning, slowly, how to stay in the room when we used to run.

Progress limps—not because we’re broken, but because we’re carrying what was never healed.

The work now isn’t about pace. It’s about depth.

It’s not about hiding or fixing the limp—it’s about tending to the body that carries it.

It’s learning how to move past the swirl of self-undoing and find steady ground again.

To remember: the aim isn’t to outshout harm. It’s to move differently than it.

To steady ourselves when everything says react. To speak when the room goes quiet. To name our hurt—without using it as a weapon.

If forward is to mean anything at all, it must change how we treat each other along the way.

Collapse is part of development—ask nature. This is not failure. It’s maturity, knocking at the door. And from here, we choose:

Will we keep turning on our own?
Or will we learn to bear the compost heat of healing—together?