I've been thinking a lot about the meaning we assign to things—and how, if we strip away all the layers of interpretation, we'd see that all thoughts are, at their core, neutral. It's the meaning we attach to a thought that charges it, and it's that meaning, not the thought itself, that gives rise to our emotional reactions.

Since I can't yet write without a lot of pain (hand surgery), I've been "writing" by voice.

I want to share a lightly edited transcription of how I unpack the meanings I've given specific thoughts—and how, in doing so, my relationship to those thoughts begins to shift.

So, today’s piece is a portal into my thought process—the things I turn over again and again, and how I try to disentangle false beliefs from simple thoughts.

Voice Note: On Meaning and Reaction

I have a lot to do today, and I’m feeling stressed. But the stress isn’t coming from the tasks themselves—it’s coming from the meaning I’m assigning to them. That meaning creates pressure, and that pressure leads me to believe two things:

A) I won’t get it all done, and
B) I won’t understand how to do what needs doing.

So I’m not stressed because I have too much to do. I’m layering meaning on top of that fact—a meaning shaped by life experience, years of conditioning, and everything I’ve been taught to believe about myself as accurate (though that doesn’t mean it’s true).

To understand where this meaning comes from, I need to look back.

I grew up not knowing the name of the dread that ruled me. Ordinary things—like sleeping at a friend’s house or having someone sleep over—were terrifying. If I couldn’t keep a close eye on my mom, I was convinced one of us would die. No other kid I knew seemed trapped inside a medium of terror they couldn’t escape.

The world I lived in had different rules from the world everyone else inhabited. The danger signals my body sent me were loud and happened constantly throughout each day. I didn’t understand things other people did, like what to do if I got kidnapped or if my mom died. The answer was always the same whenever I asked—don’t worry, that won’t happen.

This made my anxiety worse, holding me hostage not to the questions themselves, but to the terror of not knowing.

Within that medium of terror, more meanings took root. The fear from my undiagnosed panic disorder began to organize itself around the idea that I couldn’t understand. School became one of the places where this played out most intensely. Knowing I was supposed to learn and “know” what our teacher taught led me to panic during the teaching. My ears felt dense and blocked, my bones vibrated, and the world doubled. I didn’t know this was panic. I thought this was an innate inability to learn, to understand.

Anxiety is a fear of uncertainty, of not knowing what will happen next. Not knowing is a trigger for people with anxiety. If we don’t know what will happen next, we remain afraid.

Over time, this fear became a central layer of my experience. Whenever I was taught something new, the pressure of possibly not understanding became so loud that I couldn’t hear past it.

Teachers and adults misread this anxiety as a fundamental incapacity to learn.
They called me a “slow learner.”

But what I heard was: You are stupid.

I couldn’t ask questions and expose my panicked world because no child wants to be different. I adapted. I disguised. But the internal meaning had already been set:

I am fundamentally wrong.
I am fundamentally incapable of learning.

When my school flagged my poor standardized test scores, they sent me for more tests: hearing tests, vision tests, writing assessments, IQ tests—hundreds of evaluations over ten years.

As a child, I wasn’t given the results. They went to my mom, who didn’t share them.

This validated my fear that there was truly something wrong with me.

There were vague conversations about a “learning disability.” Because no one knew I had a panic disorder, I internalized all the fear and dread as proof of stupidity itself.

I was stupid.

That belief became foundational.

Even in my 50s, I battle that feeling almost every day.

Which brings me back to this morning:

I feel a familiar dread when I look at the massive list of things I must do. Not because the tasks themselves are monstrous, but because the old meaning gets activated:
I’m not smart enough to get through this.

But here’s the crucial adult skill: slowing down, separating the facts from the meaning.
Identifying what meanings we’re unconsciously assigning to neutral facts, and tracing those meanings back to their origin points.

The fact that I have a lot to do today is neutral.
It becomes charged when I infuse it with meaning: I can’t do it. I’m not capable.

In life, we often apply meanings to things without realizing it.

It’s the meaning we respond to—not the facts themselves.

The daily facts of life—the schedules, the obligations, the ordinary chaos—aren’t inherently threatening. The old, accumulated meanings we attach to them stir up so much reaction inside us.

And the work of adulthood is this: To catch ourselves in the act.

To ask: What meaning am I giving to this? And where did that meaning come from?

If any part of this resonates, I hope it offers a small opening—a moment to notice where meaning is being assigned in your life, and where it might be gently questioned.

Until next week, I will remain…