Letters
Nobody Wins a Seesaw
By Billy Barnard, IFS informed practitioner · July 14, 2026
You know exactly which message it is.
It's been sitting in drafts since Tuesday morning. One voice in you says send it today and be done. Another says leave it alone, you'll only make things worse. Both arrive in your own voice, which is why you've been counting them as one opinion and calling that opinion confusion.
So it's three in the afternoon and you're doing neither.
You've opened the draft four times since lunch. Each time you change a single word, then change it back. The cursor blinks.
You reach for your phone. Forty minutes go somewhere you'll never account for. Scrolling is the one activity in reach that both voices allow, because it moves you toward nothing, and nothing is the single point they agree on. Twice you stand up for a glass of water you don't end up drinking.
At some point you surface, check the clock, and open the draft again. Both voices tighten on cue, one in your jaw, one behind your sternum, and that tightening is the only answer you get. The phone comes back up.
Then comes dinner. Someone across the table asks how your day went, or nobody asks and you run the review alone. Either way the verdict arrives in one word: lazy. You'd fight the charge harder if you had anything from the day to show, so you plead guilty and pass the salt.
In bed you promise tomorrow, first thing, before anything else. Some honest corner of you already knows the morning will go the way the afternoon went.
Look at the afternoon again before you sign that verdict. Two voices in you worked at full strength for hours. A deadlock runs on effort. Both sides pulled at full stretch the whole time you sat there, which is why a day of visibly doing nothing has left you as tired as real work would have. That specific tiredness, exhaustion with nothing to show for it, is one signature of a deadlock.
The other signature shows up tomorrow. Every day the message sits, the send voice gets louder about the trouble coming, and the wait voice hears that loudness as proof the message really is dangerous. Each side reads the other's straining as evidence for its own case. By Thursday a two-line message has grown teeth. By the weekend you're drafting reasons it never needed sending, and a ninety-second task has eaten the week.
Other work queues up behind it too, because a freeze this strong spreads to anything standing near the message.
Now listen to what each voice is actually saying underneath the volume. The send voice keeps a list of what your silence will cost: the deadline blown, the trouble compounding. The wait voice keeps a list too, and every item on it is a way the wrong reply could hurt you.
Read both lists slowly. Each one is about protecting you. Two voices are frightened for the same person while pointing in opposite directions. The person they're both guarding has been frozen between them since Tuesday.
You've been calling this procrastination all week. It reads very differently once you catch both warnings in the same minute and notice they share a subject: you.
I know that afternoon from the inside. A while back I sat down with a stuck heaviness in my chest, one I'd been filing under tired. Parts work, the practice informed by IFS, taught me to stay with a feeling like that and ask it what it was about.
Underneath the heaviness sat a tug of war. Two protectors, one rope. Here's how I typed it mid-session:
one wants me to not send messages, afraid of me getting hurt, the other one is telling me I will get in trouble if I don't send messages
Both halves of that sentence are about keeping me safe. And the moment the two of them caught me noticing them, before anything was settled, the rope went slack. They'd spent years pulling over who gets to protect me, and somewhere in those years they'd lost track of whether I was still there at all.
The question you've been grinding on since Tuesday is which voice is right. Any playground can show you the problem with it.
The two voices are the two seats of a seesaw, and both seats bolt to the same plank. Lift one end and the other end has already paid for the ride. You can referee for a decade and the plank will hold its level the whole time, because a plank has no interest at all in verdicts.
A seesaw settles when both riders come down together. In you, both riders come down when they see the person they've been protecting awake in the middle, close enough to talk to and steady enough to listen. Each voice holds its post because it's certain you get hurt the moment it relaxes and the other side takes over. Meeting you there in the middle is the first news either of them has had that letting go leads anywhere safe.
Tomorrow, when the freeze arrives, skip the debate and carry one question instead. Offer it to both voices, the one you like and the one you keep fighting:
What are you afraid will happen to me?
Put it to the send voice while the draft sits open, then to the wait voice later, on the walk you take instead of sending. Carry it through the rest of the day with no deadline on the answer. These voices answer on their own schedule, and what comes back often sounds younger than you expect. When one finally answers, listen the way you'd listen to anyone who has spent years frightened on your behalf.
That single question is the whole assignment. It puts you back in the middle as a person instead of a prize.
Nobody wins a seesaw. The plank comes level when both riders step off, and the message takes about ninety seconds after that.
Go ask your two voices what they're afraid of.
If this one landed, read The Craving That Begged to Quit next. It follows one of these protectors all the way to the moment it asked to stop.
P.S. The session with the rope happened inside Hearth, the companion app I built for this kind of conversation. Your first week's free.