Why Can't I Get Myself Going?

There is a list. It is not even a hard list. And you sit there, and you do not do it. Not because you decided not to. There is just a pane of glass between you and your own life that you cannot get your hands through.

In this episode, Dr. Alon Aviram sits with the flat that so many people mistake for laziness. Through the story of a woman named Claire, he traces how a body that pushed at full power for too long can quietly pull its own charge down to survive, and why shame is the one thing that will never bring it back. He also names the line clearly: some kinds of flat are weather you can turn, and some are a condition that deserves a doctor's care.

Not advice. Not a diagnosis. A careful look at a body that powered down for a reason, and the small current that starts it turning again.

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Where We Are is a podcast about where you are, not what's wrong with you.

Hosted by Dr. Alon Aviram, psychotherapist. The show is built on the framework he uses in his practice: a way of finding where you're standing across the different parts of a life — the body, the self, relationships, groups, and meaning — and finding your way back to movement.

If something in this episode landed, you can go deeper at dralonaviram.com, where a free tool helps you find where you actually stand. The newsletter, The Shift, lives on Substack. And you can follow along on Instagram.

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There is a list. You know the list. It is not even a hard list. A phone call you have been meaning to make, a draw that needs sorting, the thing that would take 15 minutes and would genuinely make your week better. And you sit there. And you do not do it. Not because you decided not to. There was no decision. There is just a strange distance between you and your own life. Like a pane of glass, you cannot get your hands through. You watch yourself not move. You call it lazy or you call it stuck, and neither word is right. Because underneath the not moving, there is no ease at all. Just a low, flat hum, and a body that will not turn over. You keep waiting to feel like starting, and the feeling does not come. My name is Dr. Alona Viran. I'm a psychotherapist. This is where we are, a podcast about what's actually happening in you. I want to tell you about a woman I'll call Claire. Claire came to see me because, in her words, someone had unplugged her. She had been for most of her life a person with a full charge. She ran things. She started things. People used the word force about her and meant it kindly. And then over a stretch of a year or two that she could not quite date, the force went out. Not into sadness exactly, into flat. She described sitting on the edge of her bed in the morning and doing the math on whether standing up was worth it. I want to be careful here, and I was careful with Claire. Because when someone describes going flat, the first job is to make sure we are not looking at something that needs a doctor. We checked. This was not that. What we were looking at was something quieter and in its own way more human. Because when I asked Claire about the years before the force went out, she told me about a decade of pushing at full power through things that would have flattened anyone. A hard marriage held together by her effort alone. A parent she nursed to the end, a job she carried on her back. She had revved the engine, redlined for ten years without ever once letting it cool. And a body that red lines for ten years does not stay revved forever. Eventually it does the only intelligent thing left. It pulls the power down to protect itself. It powers off. Claire did not lose her charge. Her body cut the charge on purpose to keep her alive. What she was living inside was not a failure. It was the aftermath of a rescue. We treat energy as a moral quality. People who get up and go are good. People who cannot are letting themselves down. And so when the charge goes out, we reach for the whip. We call ourselves lazy, we call ourselves broken. We try to shame the engine back to life. And it does not work because you cannot shame a flat battery into holding a charge. You can only carefully put something back in. Here is the shape of it. A body is meant to move between two settings. It can rise, find the charge, meet the thing in front of it. And it can settle, power down, rest. Both of those are health, the rising and the settling. What you do not want is to get stuck at either end. Claire was stuck at the settled end. She had powered down so hard for such good reason that the way back up had gone quiet. And here is the cruel part of being stuck at this end. When you are flat, everything that would recharge you looks like effort you cannot afford. The walk, the friend, the small wind. They all sit on the far side of the glass, so the flatness protects itself. The less you do, the less charge you have, the less you can do. But the capacity to rise did not die. It went dormant. This is the whole difference, and it matters more than anything else, I will say. The force that ran Claire's life is not deleted. It is idling, low, waiting for a reason it can believe. And the way you wake it is not with a lecture or a whip. It is with something small enough that the flat version of you can actually do it. And real enough that your body feels the tiny return of charge and thinks quietly, oh, that. The goal is not to become a high-energy person again by Friday. The goal is to get one turn of the engine, then another, to remind a body that has been protecting you by staying down that it is allowed now to come back up. Maybe this is where you are. You are not sad or you are not only sad, you are flat. The thing you used to want, you cannot locate the wanting for. People tell you to just do it, just start, and they do not understand that the just is the entire problem. The bridge between you and starting is the exact thing that is missing. And you have almost certainly been cruel to yourself about it. You have called yourself the names, lazy, weak, wasting it. Let me offer you a different reading and see if it fits better. What if the flat is not you failing to try? What if the flat is the receipt for a very long time of trying too hard, with nothing coming back in? What if your body powered down because staying up was killing you? And it did the only merciful thing it had left. That is not weakness. That is a system that kept you alive by going quiet. It is a real place. And it is a hard one, and like every place on this map, it is not the whole of you, and it is not forever. The charge is not gone. It is low. Low is a position. And positions can change one more time because it matters. If this flatness is heavy and does not lift, if it comes with a sense that nothing will ever be worth it, please take that to a doctor. Some kinds of flat are whether you can turn. Some kinds are a condition that deserves care. You do not have to know which alone. And it has to be small, because small is the only size you can lift right now. And I am not going to pretend otherwise. Pick one action so minor that the flat version of you cannot reasonably refuse it, not sort out my life, not even go for a walk, put on your shoes. That is the whole task. Put on your shoes and stand by the door. Some days that is where it ends. You stand by the door and you take the shoes off, and that counts. It genuinely counts because the point was never the walk. The point was to send one small current through an engine that has been dark and to let your body feel the faint, real hum of coming back on. And on some days, once the shoes are on, the walk will feel a fraction more possible than it did from the bed. Not because you forced it, because you gave the charge one place to start. You are not whipping a lazy person into shape. You are jump starting a body that powered down to save you one small current at a time. The list, the drawer, the pane of glass between you and your own life. That distance is not proof that something is wrong with your character. For a lot of people, it is proof that something in them worked too hard for too long and finally pulled the power down to keep them safe. You are not lazy. You are not finished. You are idling low in a place your body chose for a reason. And the way up is not a leap. It is one small current and then another until the engine remembers it can turn. Flat is not who you are, it is where you are resting. And where you are resting is the place you can leave. I'm Alan. I'll see you next time.