Do Not Go Gentle

A note on timing, refusal, and vitality

Photo by Elisa Stone on Unsplash

I’m going to take you on a walk through my mind, along the winding, looping path that leads me where I need to be. When I let it.

I went to bed early last night. Yesterday was an in-between day. A day of rest and recalibration between integrations. I held space this time. I didn’t jump into anything new right away, which I’m often pulled to do by an invisible force that doesn’t like stillness and mistakes restlessness for a problem to solve.

Right before I crawled under the covers, a realization surfaced. Not as a thought at first, but as a sensation. My body knew something before my mind caught up.

I need to unlearn professionalism.

A withdrawal of consent from a body-level constraint.

Professionalism is not timeless.
It is not natural.
It is not objective.

It is a historical artifact of industrial capitalism, Protestant morality, and power consolidation.

I can unlearn it. But first, I have to stop mistaking it for virtue.

Professionalism didn’t just teach me how to behave. It trained my body to move before it was ready, to speak before meaning had settled, to hold tension as a baseline, and to mistake restraint for regulation.

Over time, my internal timing was overridden by external demand. My breath grew shallow. My shoulders found a semi-permanent home somewhere near my ears. I learned to interrupt my own sequencing, to translate sensation into performance, and to treat rest as a deviation instead of a requirement.

Being competent on the outside felt like constant self-interruption on the inside. A nervous system perpetually mid-sentence.

Now that same pressure arrives wrapped in gentler language. Presence. Resilience. Emotional intelligence. I’m invited to be authentic, but only if that authenticity is regulated, linear, and reassuring. I’m still expected to override my timing, manage my reactions, and absorb incoherence without showing strain.

What changed wasn’t the system. Only the aesthetic.
The control just got quieter.

I didn’t learn professionalism as an adult. I learned it much earlier than that. I know because of what surfaced next.

I didn’t go looking for proof or explanation. I just let whatever came next arrive.

When my executive function was offline, between sleep cycles, with my body still and my signal pathways wide open, something slipped past supervision.

I woke up thinking about Dylan Thomas.

Well, not exactly Dylan Thomas.

I woke up thinking about Rodney Dangerfield delivering an impassioned reading of Thomas’s poem in the movie Back to School.

I must have been in sixth or seventh grade when I saw it.

The movie keeps circling the same tension. Institutional authority missing lived meaning. At one point, Thornton Melon hires Kurt Vonnegut to write his paper and still gets dismissed. The system can’t recognize knowing when it doesn’t arrive in the approved form.

But the poem scene is different.

He isn’t joking. He’s exhausted. Sitting across from a panel of professors, being grilled, trying to prove he deserves to stay. And instead of smoothing himself out or offering something polite, he reaches for force.

I know the poem is about resisting death. But what my body recognized wasn’t mortality. It was refusal. Release. Proof of life. It arrived not as text or analysis, but as felt insistence. Volume. Pressure. Heat.

“Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”

That landed in my body long before I had language for professionalism or legitimacy or power. Long before I learned to override my timing to appear composed.

Looking back, it makes sense. The movie wasn’t just funny. It was showing me, early on, what happens when embodied knowing collides with institutions that demand performance instead of truth.

And there it was again last night. Plain as day.

I heard it. I felt it. Not as something new, but as something remembered.

The light had been there the whole time.

I just stopped dimming it.