Listen to how you describe yourself when someone asks how you’re keeping. Not the passing how are you? that we all answer with fine — but the real one, the one that wants to know how you’re holding up, how it’s all going, how you’ve been lately. Watch the words as they leave you, and notice which one lands with a little weight.
Running on empty. Stretched thin. At capacity. Lost my spark. No bandwidth. I just need to reboot. I’ve lost my flow.
We treat these as figures of speech — casual shorthand, nothing that means anything. But the words you reach for to describe your life are not descriptions. They are instructions. And your body, which has no sense of humour about language, takes them at their word.
Say you are running on empty. Look at what you’ve actually told yourself: that you are a machine, that your worth is measured in output, that rest isn’t rest but recharging — a thing you do so you can produce again. This is often the language of the boardroom, the founder’s chair, the lawyer holding other people’s crises, the high-performance worlds that run on speed and scale. Precise, efficient, and it has served you. It is also, quietly, a portrait of a life in which the person is a piece of equipment.
Or your words might run to water. I’ve lost my flow. I feel blocked. I can’t find my rhythm. But water has its own hidden instruction: it must keep moving, or it stagnates. Live inside it long enough and you start to believe stillness is failure — that if you aren’t flowing, aren’t going somewhere, something has gone wrong.
Or the words are fire. I’ve lost my spark. Burnt out. Nothing lights me up any more. And fire gives the sharpest instruction of all — that you are meant to be perpetually alight, and a flame gone quiet is a failure, rather than a fire simply waiting for fuel.
None of these is wrong. A metaphor is only a way of seeing one thing as another, and there is no correct one. But there is an enormous difference between living inside one you chose and living inside one that installed itself while you were busy.
Here is the part almost nobody does — and it isn’t mine to claim. It comes from the late David Grove, the psychotherapist who developed Clean Language in the 1980s. Grove noticed that when he offered a client even one of his own metaphors, he unknowingly steered them somewhere that wasn’t theirs. So he pared his questions back until they carried almost nothing of him — just the person’s own words, handed back with a little curiosity.
What he was after has a name. Grove wanted the metaphor to become psychoactive — his word, and he defined it plainly: an image taking on a life of its own. There is a moment when your picture stops being a phrase you’re turning over in your mind and begins to move under its own power — to have its own weather, its own will. That is the moment it turns psychoactive.
Let me show you, because it’s stranger and quieter than you’d expect — and I’ll use my own.
There was a stretch, a while back, when everything in me had gone still in a way I couldn’t push through. When my coach asked what it was like, the image that came was water stuck behind a dam. High walls, right at the back of my head. A great weight of still water, going nowhere.
This is where the image comes alive — when you stop analysing it from above and drop down into it. I was no longer thinking the word stuck; I was standing in the still water, feeling it against my legs. Then came the question:
And still water — what kind of still is that still?
When I looked closely, the water wasn’t still at all. From a distance nothing seemed to move — but up close there was a gentle motion on the surface, the way wind moves water. Something was quietly processing. Something was waiting to emerge. What I’d called stuck was actually waiting — and those are not the same thing.
And that waiting is like what?
Like waiting for a bus, I heard myself say. Not the speed of a train, not a plane — nothing so fast it overwhelms. A bus moves at a pace you can manage. Sometimes it stops in traffic, then the jam clears and it goes on. Sometimes it pulls in and people step off — the things no longer useful — and new ones get on. And that, exactly that, was the feeling of moving forward.
Here is what I want you to notice, because it’s the whole point. I didn’t decide any of it. I didn’t need the dam to break — no force, no crisis, nothing torn down. And I didn’t only see the water begin to move. I felt it: the whole body flowing gently forward, feet to crown, at the speed of a bus.
That feeling is not decoration. It is the work. Inside the metaphor, my body rehearsed the movement — did the thing before I had done it. So when the days that followed brought their own small steps forward, they didn’t feel strange, or frightening. They felt familiar. Some quiet part of me had already been there.
None of this is positive thinking. I have no interest in swapping your metaphors for cheerful ones — that would only be a nicer prison. The borrowed metaphor costs something real, and it charges quietly, for years. The woman who has been a machine for a decade has built her rest, her worth, her relationships around output, and wonders why stillness feels like guilt. The metaphor was never neutral. It has been shaping the life the whole time.
So this week, when you catch yourself in a phrase — running on empty, blocked, lost my spark — don’t reach for a fix, and don’t argue it away. Turn to the image underneath, ask it what kind it is, and let it come alive enough that you can stand inside it.
Get quiet, and let your body answer. You may find, as I did, that what you called stuck was only ever waiting — that the stillness was already moving — and that it was never asking to be broken, only to be let along, at its own manageable pace.