During the last week of June 2025, I was sitting there with my third bowl of pho. During a particular slurp, I had the most ridiculous epiphany. The kind that makes you pause mid-slurp and think, “Oh. Oh, that’s it.”
The pho doesn’t have to prove anything. It just is.
In that moment, everything clicked about why I’ve been feeling so drained by certain people and spaces then and even now.
Just before that weekend, my body was on high alert around some of the very people who claim to care the most.
Meanwhile this warm broth in front of me? It isn’t announcing its values nor proving its worth. It’s not performing nourishment or demanding gratitude. It’s just doing what warm broth does—quietly supporting, asking for nothing in return.
When Care Becomes Performance
I’ve been sitting and feeling in this realization because it explains so much about the overstimulation and exhaustion I couldn’t quite explain. You know that feeling when someone is helping you, but somehow you end up feeling more drained than before? When the care feels… heavy?
For many years, I’ve been surrounded by so much performed care lately. The coach you never hired who floods your inbox with “urgent” product launches, making sure you know how much they’re thinking of you. Or the friend who dramatically announces every supportive gesture, collecting appreciation like tokens.
They’re all working so incredibly hard to prove their care, to demonstrate their value, to make absolutely certain you recognize how much they’re helping. And that effort to have you or make you go do and you end up doing? That’s where the exhaustion lives.
Then as I compare the pho, it is not love-bombing me with intense flavors or whispering sweet promises about how much better I’ll feel. It just exists in its warm, brothy completeness, and I can take it or leave it.
Your Body’s Quiet Wisdom
I believe your body has the inante wisdom to spot performed care from miles away, even when your mind is trying to be grateful and polite about it.
Real care moves differently through the world.
It has a quality of presence without pressure, availability without agenda. Like how the ground doesn’t announce “I’m supporting you right now!” every time you take a step. It just supports. Like how your favorite sweater doesn’t perform comfort—it simply is comfortable, asking nothing of you except perhaps an occasional wash.
My body has been trying to tell me this for months, maybe years. That tightness in my shoulders when certain people offer advice. The way I suddenly feel tired after conversations that were supposed to be supportive. The subtle urge to escape situations where help is being offered with just a little too much intensity.
I kept dismissing these signals, telling myself I should be grateful for any support. But what if those signals weren’t ingratitude but just something to be present or listen to?
The Weight of Hidden Agendas
Genuine care, I’m realizing, has no agenda beyond the care itself. It doesn’t need to be seen, acknowledged, or reciprocated in any particular way. It just flows from a full cup, naturally and without effort.
Performed care always carries hidden weight.
The weight of needing to be appreciated.
The weight of creating dependency.
The weight of maintaining an image as someone who cares.
That weight gets transferred to you, the recipient.
Suddenly you’re not just receiving support—you’re also managing someone else’s need to feel helpful, their hunger for validation, their attachment to being your solution. It just leaves this BLECK in my mouth.
Pho? That bowl of goodness I was slurping? No such attachments. It offered what it had, completely and without strings, and my response is entirely my own business.
So the keeping up exhaustion from all this time, now makes so much sense!
The Exhaustion Makes Sense Now
I mean, no wonder I’ve been so tired. I’ve been carrying not just my own stuff, but the emotional labor of other people’s care performance. Nodding gratefully at advice that didn’t quite fit. Reassuring helpers that yes, their help was helpful. Managing other people’s feelings about their helpfulness.
It’s like being given a gift that comes with invisible strings attached—strings that only reveal themselves when you try to move freely. The gift itself might be lovely, but those strings create a weight that has nothing to do with the actual offering.
Why? Because, real care never came with the strings-attached, or creating the obligation nor debt, even the maintenance.
To sound like a broken record—it just is!
Learning to Recognize the Real Thing
I’m getting better at feeling the difference now. Genuine care has a quality of spaciousness around it. There’s room for you to receive it fully, reject it completely, or take just the parts that serve you. There’s no performance anxiety on either side.
Performed care feels dense, somehow. Compressed. Like there’s no room for anything except the prescribed response of gratitude and transformation. It carries an unspoken expectation that you’ll be appropriately moved, changed, or grateful.
When someone offers genuine care, your system can relax. You don’t have to prove that their care worked or that you’re worthy of it. You can just be present with what’s offered and respond authentically.
When someone performs care, your nervous system stays vigilant. Some part of you knows you’re now in a subtle transaction, that something is expected of you beyond simply receiving support.
What Warm Pho Taught Me About Genuine Care: The Pho Principle in Daily Life
Though I don’t like giving this experience a name, but I’m calling this insight the “Pho Principle”, and it’s changing how I navigate relationships, business interactions, and even my own caring for others.
I’m looking for care that doesn’t announce itself. Support that shows up consistently without fanfare. People who can offer what they have without needing to know exactly how it landed for you. Relationships where care flows naturally in both directions without scorekeeping.
And maybe most importantly, I’m learning to be more pho-like in my own caring. Perhaps, part of this experience is to offer what I have without attachment to how it’s received; to support without needing appreciation; and to care without the performance.
The world has enough performed care, doesn’t it? What we’re all starving for is the real thing—warm, present, and authentic. Care that asks nothing of us except that we receive it in whatever way serves us.
Just like a good bowl of pho. Simple, nourishing, and completely without agenda.
Maybe that’s how the best wisdom works—not some grand gestures or complex frameworks, but in the quiet presence of things that simply know how to be what they are.