I understand inertia far too well.

Not just the textbook version, an object at rest stays at rest, but the other half that my science teachers drilled into me with equal conviction: an object in motion stays in motion. I used to think that threshold moments, those moments where you know you need to make a decision but keep circling because you can’t quite grasp the right option, were places of stillness. That you slowly approached them, and then the friction of the situation caused you to stop, right at the moment you needed to move forward. And that the stillness was what you needed to overcome to take the next step and cross the threshold.

I was wrong. At least about myself.

Why I Couldn’t Make a Decision

I rarely approach a threshold moment from stillness, or even near stillness. I’m the type to bulldoze my way through things, pushing harder, ignoring the warning signs on the dashboard, trying to overcome obstacles through sheer force of will. And for a long time, that worked. Until it didn’t.

For years, I bulldozed my way through a fully funded PhD program, determined to beat the system and become an academic come hell or high water. I appeared to have institutional support. I had funding. I had a relatively stable pathway forward. And I had a growing, quiet sense that something was deeply wrong that I was getting very good at ignoring (or at least not acknowledging).

Then my therapist suggested I slow down. Really evaluate what I was doing and why.

So I did. Or I thought I did.

Frozen, Shrinking, or Still: How to Tell the Difference

I felt incredibly still. Present, finally. Deliberately considering my options for the first time instead of charging through them. What I didn’t realize, what I couldn’t see from inside it, was that I wasn’t still at all. I was making myself smaller. I didn’t want to be visible, because I was afraid people would see me as the stupidest person in the world: a fully funded PhD student, walking away from good money and institutional support. So I shrank. I stopped taking up space. I stopped being seen. And I told myself that was stillness.

It wasn’t. It was fear wearing stillness as a costume (or like a wolf in sheep’s clothing).

And then I froze. For a good six months, I knew exactly how much staying in that program was costing me, and I still couldn’t make the choice I already knew I needed to make. I framed it, to the people who asked and to myself, as carefully evaluating my options, making sure I found the right path forward. But I was lying. Mostly to myself. I was avoiding the scary choice that would have me abandon a relatively stable pathway for something unknown. I thought the inertia I needed to overcome was the stillness of not moving. But I wasn’t still. I was still moving, just not in my normal bulldozer fashion, which meant I had to deal with two layers of inertia I hadn’t accounted for: actually slowing myself down for real, and then, once I’d finally stopped, the additional weight of making the decision to leave and following through with it.

That second one, the following through, was the harder part. Which surprised me.

How to Get Unstuck When Circling Won’t Stop

Maybe this sounds familiar.

You know you’re at a threshold. You’ve known for a while. And you’re pretty sure you’re being still, waiting, considering, giving yourself time, but the clarity isn’t coming, and the circling isn’t stopping, and something about the whole thing feels increasingly heavy instead of increasingly light.

I want to invite you to slow down a little more and really check in with what’s actually happening.

Are you still? Or are you freezing?

Stillness and freezing feel almost identical from the inside. But they’re not the same thing. Freezing is your nervous system responding to threat, it’s your body saying danger, stop, don’t move. It’s not the neutral pause before a clear decision. It’s fear doing what fear does, which is making the choice feel impossible so you don’t have to make it.

And shrinking isn’t stillness either. Shrinking is movement in reverse, retreating from visibility, from the weight of being seen making a choice, from the possibility of being wrong in public. It looks like stillness because you’ve stopped going forward. But you’re not paused. You’re moving away.

True stillness is something different. And it’s harder to find than it sounds, because it asks something of you that freezing and shrinking specifically protect you from.

Real stillness at a threshold is the moment you stop moving long enough to actually look. Not with rose-coloured glasses, not trying to romanticize any option into something more palatable than it is, but really digging in, getting messy, and figuring out what you can actually choose, and what each choice will cost you, and what each choice will give you. That’s the work of the stillness. Not waiting for clarity to arrive. Looking directly at the thing until the clarity emerges from the looking.

That’s when movement becomes possible again. Not easy, inertia still exists, and starting a new direction after a full stop is its own weight to reckon with. But possible. And this time, it’s movement that’s yours.

The Question the Threshold Is Actually Asking You

So if you’re circling, and you’ve been circling for a while, and you keep telling yourself you just need a bit more time to figure it out , I’m not going to tell you that you’re wrong to take time. But I am going to ask you to be honest with yourself about what’s actually happening in that time.

Are you in genuine stillness, doing the real work of looking directly at your options?

Or are you frozen, waiting for the fear to pass before you’ll let yourself see what you already know?

Or are you shrinking, making yourself smaller so that whatever comes next doesn’t feel like it was really your choice at all?

The threshold isn’t asking you to be fearless. It’s asking you to be honest about which kind of not-moving you’re actually doing.

That’s usually where the movement begins.

If you’re interested in exploring your current threshold, you might be interested in a Threshold Clarity Session.