My mother wanted me to do well and have fun doing it. My father wanted me to find what lit me up and pursue that with everything I had. My grandmother wanted me to represent myself and our family with dignity, inside and most definitely outside the house. My grandfather wanted me to be treated well and accept nothing less. And Camp Minisink, the sleep away camp I attended six or seven weeks every summer for nearly a decade that was run by some phenomenal Black women and one awesome dude named Fred, wanted all of us campers to live a life of service.

I am realizing, as I write this, that I give my foundation about the same attention I give my own breathing, which is not much attention at all. You do not notice breathing until bronchitis or covid catches you, and every breath turns into work. The foundation I received was like that. Holding me up the whole time while I was busy not really noticing it with any consistency.

Not everyone got my kind of foundation. Some people had to fight the very thing was supposed to hold them. In my case, everything felt fine, but I can imagine for those who wanted their foundational experience to be different, the thought of leaving was not without its struggles. From what I have witnessed, the desire to stay or go, always feels rooted in our own level of loyalty. I have always felt loyal to myself above all else, but loyalty is not the glue that kept me stuck to my foundation back then. In some ways I can see how that lulled me into stillness rather than more adventure. I did venture out. Just not as far as my soul knows I need to go.

When my father passed suddenly, it swiftly made me aware of how closely I was clinging to the makers of my foundation. I love them and I loved how it felt inside off what they built around me. But as life would have it, one opportunity to reflect is never enough.

When I was in my early twenties I applied for Real World Season 3 in San Francisco. I was flown to LA in a snowstorm to have a final interview with the production team alongside other cast hopefuls like Puck and Pedro. I was about to be cast on one of the first reality TV shows at the launch of a television phenomenon. I was the last person cut before they finalized the cast for that season. A few weeks later the show’s co-creator Mary Ellis-Bunim called me to give me a spot on a new show they were about to launch called Road Rules. I turned it down. Then she called back to offer me a job working for Real World and MTV. I turned that down too. In retrospect, I was bonkers to say no. What a fun adventure that would have been. My thinking was I would have had to move to California right away and leave behind my family, my boyfriend, my college studies, and everything familiar to me. It all worked out in another way. I married the boyfriend and had two amazing kids, got two degrees and a career I enjoyed immensely. But the point is this. The primary consideration that cause me to turn down two life-shifting opportunities in television was me staying inside the familiar. No family member, boyfriend, college or job held me anywhere. I was holding my own leash and I did not even know it. I sometimes wonder what kind of Substacks I would be writing if I had loosened that leash back then. C’est la vie.

Loyalty is more than being true to yourself. It means paying real attention to the opportunities you make or receive as you move through life, and not sleepwalking past them or crip-walking through something that scares you like everything is cool. Opportunities require you to take action. Your foundation, great or not so great, built you to be ready to do just that. For example, I have two children’s books, complete and ready to go. Only one is published. Really, Shell? I say that with full love for myself and zero judgment. But still. WTH.

Here is what I know now. Loyalty has to start with me. Not arrogantly but actually. I have to be loyal to myself first and then I can offer something real to everyone else from the position I am meant to be standing in. Love from a distance is still love. Moving in a direction that is different from your tribe is not abandonment. It is the thing that your early years with them actually built you to do.

I know what I am here to do. The people I lead, the ones who show up for what I offer, they have told me I am moving them in real directions toward themselves. I receive that and I appreciate the confirmation. But I also know from somewhere deep and true that what I have done so far is a fraction of what I came for.

Thirty-some-odd years later the opportunity came back around. I was cast on Deal or No Deal Island. This time I did not chase it. It fell in my lap, and because it did not look like something I had gone after on purpose, I resisted it at first. Old habits hold on longer than you think.

After the show wrapped I got on a call with Matt, the executive producer, just to say hey. He mentioned his career started with Real World. I told him I was a finalist on season 3. He could not believe it because he had worked on that very season. Then he asked me something I did not have a fast answer for. What took you so long to come back?

Nothing that is for you will miss you. I know that now in a way I didn’t understand in my twenties. I also know that you do not have to slow walk your way to everything just to stay comfortable. The leash loosens either way. The only question is how many years you spend holding it before you notice your own hand.

The lease in my hand. I am putting it down.

They assume tough. They assume edge. They assume a certain kind of armor that gets built when you grow up somewhere loud and chaotic. There is no one to blame for that. As a Bronx native I can tell you that the assumptions come largely from movies and television depictions of the Bronx that captured one moment in time and never quite let it go. The Bronx is not underestimated. It is disproportionately assumed to be more of what it is not and less of what it actually is. The assumptions arrive before the conversation does.

The Bronx gave me everything. Which is why growing up there is a masterclass in life.

It taught me to hold steady through chaos. To know the difference between loud and dangerous. And always, and I mean always, to know where your exits are.

New York City is an attack on all of your senses in the best and worst ways simultaneously.

One of the best ways is the food. Authentic, specific, from every corner of the world, available at any hour, never apologizing for what it is. One of the worst ways is the subway. Rickety, fast, loud, smelly, overcrowded, a multi-time-per-day experience that every New Yorker volunteers for because there is no faster, financially feasible option and somehow that shared suffering becomes its own kind of community.

But inside all of that, the Bronx was always the steady part. The anchor.

Here is something most people do not know. The Bronx is the only part of New York City that is on the mainland. Every other borough is surrounded by water. Manhattan. Queens. Brooklyn. Staten Island and even our cousin Long Island. The Bronx is connected to the rest of the country by land. Which means if anything pops off in New York City you can get out of the city, the state, and the country from the Bronx.

I did not learn that as a geography lesson. I learned it as a life principle.

No matter how fast and loud and chaotic everything around you gets, always know where your exits are.

I was a new partier in the city when I went to see Heavy D and the Boyz perform live at the Red Parrot in Manhattan.

We were having the time of our lives. Dancing. Singing along. The kind of night that feels like it was made specifically for you and your friends and this exact moment in your youth. And somewhere in the middle of all of that I noticed two men on the other side of the room staring each other down in a way that had nothing to do with the music.

I told my friends we needed to leave.

They ignored me. The music was too good. The night was too right. Nobody wanted to hear it.

So I found the nearest exit which was at the back of the club and I took it. By the time I made it around to the front side of the building people were running into the street and shots had been fired inside. People were injured. I was completely safe on the sidewalk watching it unfold.

The Bronx taught me that.

Act on your instincts immediately. Never wait for consensus. Never follow the crowd when your body is already moving toward the door. And most crucially, know the difference between a good time and a safe one because those two things are not always at the same party.

Here is another thing about Bronx people and what the borough taught us that may not be easy to identify from the outside.

Bronx pride does not announce itself in comparison to you. It is too deep and too robust for that. We don’t even notice you until we do, and when we do it’s only to invite you to join the party. Visitors are always welcomed in the Bronx. But you better act right or you will leave with less than you came with.

People from the Bronx do not walk past a burning building. They do not step over someone in a dire situation and keep moving. They jump in. They help. They pull together around pain or injustice with a speed and certainty that does not require a meeting or a vote or a designated leader.

And they will equally and without hesitation handle you if you are the one causing the problem.

I grew up watching that operate in real time. I did not have to be taught it. I absorbed it the way you absorb the sounds of a neighborhood you have lived in your whole life. It became part of how I read a room, how I respond when something is wrong, how I understand what it means to be in a community rather than just adjacent to one.

People ask me sometimes where I get my groundedness from. My ability to stay calm when things are moving fast around me. My instinct for knowing when to stay and when to go. My refusal to panic when everyone else is.

The answer is always the Bronx.

It did not make me hard. It made me steady. It made me perceptive. It made me someone who knows where every exit is before the night even gets started.

Now I want to ask you something.

Where are you from?

Not the elevator pitch version. The real one. The neighborhood. The block. The building. The particular combination of people and circumstances and sounds and smells that shaped how you move through the world before you had language for any of it.

Because wherever that place is, it gave you something too.

Maybe it taught you how to stretch a dollar until it hollered. Maybe it taught you how to read a room before you walked all the way into it. Maybe it taught you that family doesn’t always have the same last name and that loyalty is its own currency. Maybe it taught you how to find joy in the middle of circumstances that were designed for misery.

Whatever it gave you, it is in you. Operating quietly. Showing up in how you lead, how you love, how you handle the moments that require more than strategy and more than intellect.

That is your masterclass.

And on the days when your past feels like a source of pain or something to avoid, looking at your roots through this lens can steady you. It can give you something to pat yourself on the back for.

The question is whether you have stopped long enough to name it. To hold it. To let yourself feel proud of what you already know because you feel it.

Know your exits. And before you take them, make sure the people around you know where they are too.

Not by staying in the fire. Not by martyring yourself for someone who would not do the same for you. By sounding the alarm the way only someone from your place can sound it. With the particular urgency and specificity that only comes from growing up exactly where you grew up.

After that what they do is their choice.

You showed them the door. You delivered the message. You made sure they knew it was time to roll out. At least that’s how we do it in the Bronx.

Whether they follow you or not is entirely on them.

Know your exits. Sound the alarm. And never burn yourself down for someone who is standing next to a perfectly good door.

I don’t advertise this. I didn’t hang up a sign or build a brand around it. The experience with me just became true over time in the same way that things become identifiable before they have a name or label. I am easy to talk to. Absorbing my response… a little less easy but I naturally create space without demanding anything back. I’ve learned over time that I can hold a lot without feeling the weight of it.

People feel that too, I suspect. So they come my way. Most days, I am glad they do.

Time with myself has also helped me recognize that being someone’s safe place doesn’t require the holder to be depleted. The version of the story where the woman holds everyone together while secretly drowning in the weight of her own emotions and thoughts is very real for many women. Black women especially carry this. We don’t do this because we are born this way. We do this because we are conditioned to function at full capacity no matter what we are personally navigating. We hold rooms, friends, entire teams at work even though very few of those lucky recipients ever think to ask how we are doing. We know how to be calm even in our own storms and we often volunteer to show up for others while hiding from ourselves.

I recognize this pattern in myself even though my version of this is quieter. It’s more of a light rain shower than a storm, if you will. My needs tend to be smaller than most. That’s because I genuinely go easy on myself. I love my own company. I have also come to love my thoughts no matter how zany or delusional they may be. It turns out that the storm quiets down quite a bit when the standards you are living by are actually your own.

I’ve learned through self-reflection that I don’t look for a safe place until I am too fried to give it to myself. And whew, the gap between that first quiet whisper of needing something and the point where you finally get it, is its own sneaky form of self-abandonment. What happens in that timeframe is not a dramatic crisis. It’s just you… making yourself available to everyone else while forgetting to turn that same offering towards yourself.

Sometimes I do not need rest. I need company. Yes, I love myself and I love my thoughts. I also love connection and sometimes I have to go find it. That’s not a problem even though we often like to label it as one. It is a good thing when you know you need your people or good people around you and you seek it out. Always waiting for your needs to show up at your doorstep is a fool’s endeavor.

When I go and find it, it looks like this.

I ask for plans. I call my mom and go spend the night with her. I orchestrate a full weekend at my sister’s house with my nieces and brother-in-law. I invite the people I enjoy to come stay with me for a while. I plan a weekend away or a whole week somewhere with anyone I love who can get away with me.

None of this is complicated. None of it requires justification or performing a level of need that is bigger than what I actually have. The only requirement is for me to notice the signal of my needs early enough to discover or create a response.

That is a practice worth exercising over and over again.

Choosing not to wait until the tank is empty. Not pushing through to the point where I am too spent to receive what I need when it arrives. The play is catching it early. Naming it honestly. And, going to get it without making a bigger deal than it is.

I want to say something to the women who wait. The ones who are so good at being a safe place that they have convinced themselves they don’t need one. The ones who have been told directly or by example that needing something is a luxury they cannot afford right now. The ones who have been needed for so long that their own needs have gone limp from lack of use.

Your needs don’t have to be urgent to be real.

I realized that I don’t need to have a breakdown to deserve a restorative response.

I learned that my need doesn’t have to be bigger than everyone else’s for it to matter.

The internal whisper, quiet restlessness and realizing that my overflowing cup is bone dry was the signal.

And, it’s your signal too. Your big-ass clue to return the care package to the sender.

Answer the call before it gets louder.

Go find your people. Stay with your tribe - even if that is a tribe of one. Plan the trip. Invite someone over. Give yourself the same generous availability as you do for everyone who walks through your door or rings your phone.

You have been the emotional Marriott Hotel for a long time. Let someone hold you up for a bit. Your energy needs a safe place to stay too.

Even the best hotels have “do not disturb” signs. Use yours.

We met naturally. Hit it off immediately. Worked in similar professions, moved simultaneously through similar seasons of life, held similar beliefs about how we thought we should be living. We had very different tastes in music and television but even those differences became common ground for our conversations. The kind of friendship that finds its footing quickly and feels like it will last forever.

For a long time it did.

Over the years I started to notice something.

My friend had experienced more trauma and sought out more drama in her life than I had. For a good while, I had space for that. That space, which I told myself was mutual, had no space for me.

Every call. Every get together. Every conversation circled back to her struggles, her frustrations, the turbulence of her life. She never asked about me. Never asked what I was dealing with or what mattered to me or what was happening in my world. And she certainly did not make room for the good things in life which have always been and continue to be my favorite things to talk about.

I started to recognize that as my life was expanding, largely because of what I chose to focus on in the world, her life was becoming more stagnant. In some ways smaller.

I know she was happy for my good news. That is the part that made it complicated and worthy of my intentional assessment. She was not malicious. She was not jealous in any way that she was choosing. She simply could not absorb things that were happening to me and for me. And because she could not absorb it I became an invisible half of what we had built together. The not-so-silent, silent partner who was seen and never heard.

During my good news seasons, of which there were many, I started keeping things to myself and sharing them with the people who could actually hold them. I learned quickly who those people were. Not by testing anyone. By paying attention to who asked. Who leaned in. Who made room.

I also noticed that it wasn’t just me disappearing in that relationship. My time was vanishing too.

I was losing time away from all the fruitful things I could have done instead of letting my ears burn from the embers of my friend’s turbulent experiences.

That’s the itemized invoice no one ever receives.

The emotional weight of being the unseen friend in the duo is one thing. But the time. The energy. The hours and the attention and the presence you pour into a dynamic that has quietly stopped being reciprocal. That is the invisible tax. And it compounds quietly. So subtle you cannot measure it until you are buried under it.

This is not about blame.

My friend is a good person who was doing the best she could inside of what life handed her and the distress she was designing unconsciously. None of what I am describing was intentional. It wasn’t meant to diminish me. It was simply the natural outcome of two people growing in different directions at different speeds until the gap between those directions became too wide to bridge with good intentions alone.

What I had to grieve was not the friendship itself but what I had believed the friendship was. The equal exchange I thought we had. The mutual curiosity I assumed was there. The room I believed existed for all of me not just the parts that fit inside her world.

Here is what I’ve learned about good news and the people who can hold it.

Not everyone can and that’s not a character flaw. It is a capacity question. And capacity is shaped by so many things that have nothing to do with how much someone loves you. Their own unresolved pain. The size of the life they are currently living. The emotional bandwidth available after they have tended to their own survival.

But... you still need people who can hold the depth and width of who you are.

My good news deserves a room. My wins deserve to be witnessed. My joy deserves to be received by people who can actually take it in and hand something back to me in return. And so does yours.

When I stopped calling that friend with good news, it was not a punishment. It was not a judgment. It was an act of care for myself and quietly for her too. Those friends don’t need the reminder of the distance between where they are and where you are going. And you do not need to keep making yourself smaller to fit inside a friendship that stopped having room for all of you.

Find the people who ask.

Call them first.

Call them with everything.

The stories are not dramatic. They are so ordinary and so easy and so unlike what we have been told about how friendship works after a certain age that I think they deserve the conversation.

I think what we have been told is completely false.

Launching friendships have no deadlines.

We have been sold a story. That your real friends are the ones you made young. In school. In college. In the early years when proximity and shared circumstance did all the heavy lifting. After that the story goes quiet. As if friendship has an expiration date on new entries and the list just closes at some point without warning.

Here is what that story is also doing that we do not talk about enough. It is keeping us loyal to what we built even when it no longer feels good. Staying because of the history. Because of the years. Because leaving would mean admitting that the investment stopped paying off a while ago. And while we are holding on to what was, the new thing cannot get in.

The sunk cost of old friendship is costing us new ones.

The first new friend I made was at a networking event.

We ended up in the same small group, talking about nothing in particular, the way you do at those things before the conversation finds its footing. When the group started to disperse a woman turned directly to me and said something I was not expecting.

I like you. Do you want to be friends?

Straightforward. Unguarded. No pretending it was something other than exactly what it was. She saw something she liked and said so out loud and asked for what she wanted.

I said yes immediately. We exchanged numbers. A week later we sat at dinner for three hours getting to know each other and it was genuinely great. The kind of conversation that moves fast because both people are actually interested. The kind that ends and you think I want to do that again.

That is a friend.

The second one found me at my clubhouse.

I had gone down there to watch the Oscars on one of the large televisions. Solo. Just looking to change the scenery and spend the evening somewhere other than my own couch. A woman came in with her family and spotted me already set up and settled in. She walked over and asked if she could join me for the show.

Sure, I said.

She went upstairs and came back down. We watched the whole thing together. Laughing. Talking. Sharing bits of our lives in the way you do when you are comfortable with someone faster than you expected. By the end of the evening we had exchanged numbers.

She lives in California. Comes back occasionally to visit her family in my building. I sent her my Deck and Journal and GPS book. She loved them. Two months later she returned and we went out for tacos and spent a few hours cackling about how much we have in common. Her family is from the same neighborhood I grew up in. We spent part of that visit reminiscing about things we did as kids from completely different corners of the same world.

That is also a friend.

What I love about both of these women is how simply they arrived.

No slow build. No years of proximity doing the work. One said I like you out loud at a networking event. The other asked to share an Oscars moment with me. Both of those small unguarded ordinary exchanges turned into something real.

What made them possible was presence. Availability. Being a person who says yes when someone asks if she can sit with you. Being in the room and actually being in the room.

That is available to you at any age.

We stop making new friends not because it stops being possible. We stop because we stop being available for it. We get busy. We get comfortable. We stop going places alone just because we feel like changing the scenery. We stay in our lane even when something or someone interesting is standing right next to us.

Take off the friendship glasses you have been looking through.

Every new contact, every exchange with someone you just met, is a very possible new adventure. One that is giving to you and giving you a place to be exactly who you are right now.

Not who you were when you built what you built.

Who you are now.

That person deserves new friends too.

It does not matter if I am going for the evening. It does not matter if I am going for dinner and fully intend to be home by ten. The suitcase comes with me. Every time. Without exception.

People find this hilarious. My sister does not even blink anymore. She just opens the door, sees the bag, and says okay what are we doing.

That is exactly the right question.

I do not pack because I am indecisive. I pack because I understand something about joy that took me a while to fully trust.

Joy does not share its itinerary.

You can plan for dinner. Joy might have brunch the next morning already scheduled. You can plan to be home by ten. Joy might have a friend’s marriage proposal on the agenda that keeps everyone up until two in the morning celebrating.

That is exactly what happened one evening at my sister’s house.

We were having dinner. Our good friend stopped by with her boyfriend. We ate. We laughed. We did what we always do when we are all in the same room together. And then her boyfriend got down on one knee.

Right there. In my sister’s house. In the middle of what was supposed to be a regular “stop by and eat” night.

She said yes. We screamed. We cried. We held each other the way women do when something beautiful happens that everyone in the room has been quietly rooting for.

I stayed the night because of course I did. The suitcase was already there.

The next morning my sister made breakfast for us. We sat around the table with my niece who had just come back from a college tour and we talked about what she discovered. What felt right. What surprised her. What she was starting to imagine for herself. It was one of those morning conversations that you did not know you needed until you were already inside of it.

Then we watched a show together. The kind of lazy comfortable afternoon that only happens when nobody has anywhere to be and nobody is rushing toward the door.

And then my sister and I looked at each other the way sisters do and decided we were going out. We got dressed cute. Found a spot with good food and good drinks and settled in for one of our favorite dinner time activities.

People watching.

If you have never people watched with someone who loves it as much as you do, I genuinely feel for you. My sister and I can turn a corner table and a view of the room into an entire evening. The commentary. The stories we invent. The absolute delight of being two women who are having the best time at a dinner that neither of us could have scripted.

None of that was on the original plan.

It was better.

Here is what the suitcase is actually about.

It is not about clothes. It is not about being extra or overprepared or unable to commit to a simple dinner and a drive home. It is about having decided in advance that whatever joy shows up with tonight I am going to be ready for it.

Prepared for the whimsy. Dressed for the dancing. Ready for the sleepover that nobody saw coming. Open to the morning conversation that turns out to be exactly what you needed to hear.

I did not know my friend was getting proposed to that night.

I did not know my niece was going to tell us about her college tour over scrambled eggs the next morning.

I did not know my sister and I were going to end up at a corner table doing something lighthearted and fun.

But I was packed.

And because I was packed I did not have to choose between going home and staying for all of it.

You do not have to bring a literal suitcase everywhere you go. Although I highly recommend it.

What I am really talking about is the decision you make in advance to be available to joy in whatever form it arrives. To not be so committed to the plan that you miss what the evening actually had in mind for you.

Joy does not brief you. It does not send a calendar invite. It just shows up at dinner with a boyfriend who has a ring in his pocket and a whole evening’s worth of beautiful that nobody saw coming.

Figure it out because we are doing it.

Pack the bag.

There is more to that story and one day I will tell it to you in full because it holds some of the most clarifying information I have ever received about myself and about what it means to truly know something before you know it. But that is for another time.

What I want to tell you about today is the night after his burial.

The two weeks between the moment my father left his body and the day we put his body in the ground were two of the most generously giving weeks of my life.

I say generously giving because that is exactly what they were. I gave everything I had to everyone who needed it. I notified family members. I supported my mother and my sister in their grief while holding my own. I made arrangements with the funeral home. With the cemetery. I invited people to his services. I stood at those services and accepted every condolence with the fullness of my presence because I understood that these were the last moments anyone would have with my father in the physical in this lifetime. I was not going to be anywhere else but there.

The long drive to his burial. The people who stood around after to talk about how wonderful he was in their lives. Every single moment of it I received and cherished and gave myself to completely.

And then we came home.

I took a shower and got into my bed.

And the only thing I could think to do was pull my energy back.

Not as a technique. Not because someone had taught me this. Because my body knew that every single piece of me was scattered across two weeks of people, tasks, responsibilities, grief and love and showing up for it all. And my body wanted to come home.

So I laid there and I started calling it back.

From every person I held in those two weeks. From every arrangement I had made. From every conversation I had carried. From every room I had stood in and every hand I had held and every moment I had given myself to completely and without reservation.

I called all of it back.

It felt like a car going through a car wash.

The front of the car enters first. And then slowly, from front to back, something starts to happen. Not from the car’s own effort. The car does not do any of the work. It is all done for the car. The cleaning. The scrubbing. The refreshing. Moving from the front all the way to the back in a slow and thorough sweep that misses nothing. Followed by the water that washes everything away.

And then you start to see the light at the end of the tunnel. That particular brightness at the exit of a car wash where the sky comes back into view. Clean. Clear. The car restored to itself.

That is what it felt like.

When it was done the only thing I was left with was me and every beautiful memory my father and I had ever made together. And in some ways I could also feel his presence in that room. Kissing me on the forehead. Tucking me in the way he used to. Saying goodnight from wherever he had gone in his departure.

That sleep felt like I was being carried like a baby in a Björn.

I did not know this was a practice then. I did not know it had a name or a process or that other people did versions of it intentionally.

What I knew in my body and soul was that I had given everything I had for two weeks and that my body was asking for it back. And that the asking was not selfish. It was necessary. It was the most loving thing I could have done for myself in that moment. And in some ways the most loving thing I could do for everyone who was going to need me to show up again tomorrow.

You cannot be solid support from a scattered self.

I want to tell you about this practice now because summer is exactly the kind of season that scatters you.

Not in grief. In joy. In movement. In the generous giving of yourself to every barbecue, birthday, day party and long evening that asks something of your energy. Summer takes and takes in the most delightful ways. And most of us fall into bed at the end of it without ever calling any of it back.

Try this tonight.

Lay down. Get still. And start at the beginning of your day. Every person you gave your energy to. Every task. Every conversation. Every moment of worry or joy or effort or love. Call it back. Not with force. The way you call a child in from outside at the end of the day. Gently. Firmly. It is time to come home now.

Feel it return to you from front to back the way the car wash works. Slow. Thorough. Nothing missed.

And when it is done notice what is left.

That is you. Restored to yourself. Ready for tomorrow.

Your father, your mother, your person, your work, your children, your dreams — all of it will still be there in the morning. Either literally or in spirit.

But tonight, for this hour, in this bed, all of you belongs to you.

Call it back.

That is what makes it so useful when you are not ready to answer them.

The light stays longer. The air feels different. There is a collective permission that descends on everyone in June that says put it down for now. Rest. Play. Eat outside. Go somewhere. Be in the mix of all of it. And for a few months the weight of what you have been carrying quietly agrees to sit in the corner while you live your regular summer life.

This is not a bad thing. Sometimes you genuinely need the reprieve.

But sometimes the reprieve becomes the hiding. And the thing about summer hiding is that it does not look like hiding at all. It looks like joy.

The summer before I ended my marriage I was everywhere.

I took my boys to their friends’ birthday parties. I had adventures around the tristate area with and without them. All the things New York summers have to offer a mother and her kids. A family vacation. A girls trip. Real fun. Genuine laughter. Moments I am glad I had and glad my boys had

.

And underneath all of it something I was not ready to look at directly.

I knew before summer arrived that my marriage was way up on the rocks. I felt hurt. Scared. Shocked in the way you can be shocked by something you already knew was true. And so I did what summer made available to me. I leaned into everything. The lightness. The movement. The fullness of a season that makes it very easy to feel like everything is fine because right now in this moment it genuinely is.

Summer is very good at that.

It was on the girls trip that the hiding stopped working.

Not dramatically. Not in a fight or a breakdown or a conversation I went looking for. The Universe does not usually announce itself. It just puts you in the right place at the right time and lets the rest happen on its own.

I ended up in a poolside conversation with a single father who was there with his entire family. All generations. And what started as a pleasant evening exchange turned into a four in the morning reckoning neither of us planned for.

He told me about his life as a single dad. The things he wished he could have salvaged in his marriage. How he was helping his children through the new configuration of their family. The grief and the growth and the particular kind of clarity that only comes after a decision that changes everything.

And as I sat there listening I understood something.

I was not just supporting a stranger.

I was being shown a preview.

The Universe had placed me poolside with a man who was a few steps ahead of me in a process I had not yet admitted was already inevitable for me. Not to frighten me. To prepare me. To say gently and without judgment — this is real. It is not going away. And look. Someone has already walked through it and is still standing.

Summer had been letting me hide. And then summer sent me exactly what I had been hiding from.

I want to say something honest about the hiding.

I do not regret it. Not for a single moment of it. The boys needed that summer. I needed that summer. The joy was real. The fun was real. The memories we made that season are ones I would not trade.

But I also know that I was using the lightness of the season to defer a conversation with myself that had been waiting since before the weather changed. And that is the particular gift and danger of summer. It is generous enough to give you a genuine reprieve. And if you are not careful it will give you so many of them in a row that September arrives and the thing you put in the corner in June is still sitting there. Bigger now. Quieter. More patient than you wanted it to be.

Summer is not the problem.

Hiding is not really the issue either.

The problem is not knowing the difference between rest and avoidance. Between ease and escape. Between giving yourself a season to breathe and using a season to not feel the thing you were just starting to feel in April.

Your body knows the difference even when your calendar does not.

The girls trip knew. The poolside conversation at four in the morning knew. The stranger who was living my future knew.

Summer will come back every year. It always does. Carrying its joyful light and its generous permission to put things down for a while.

The things you are hiding from do not take vacation. They do not pack a bag or book a flight. They just sit quietly and wait. Patient in a way that only the truth can be patient. Until you are ready. Or until it cannot wait anymore.

So enjoy the summer. All of it. The trips and the parties and the long evenings and the particular ease that only this season knows how to deliver. Let it restore you. Let it refresh you.

Just know that what your refreshed energy will eventually have to tend to is still there.

Rest in summer. Return to yourself in summer. And carry enough of that restored energy back with you to meet what is waiting on the other side of it.

That is not a warning. That is self-care with your eyes open.

I moved to a new place. A quiet suburb. A home I made the deliberate choice to have entirely to myself for the first few years. What came with it was more stillness than I had ever lived inside of. And at first I did not know what to do with it.

So I did what most of us do.

I filled it.

Binge watched everything I could find that held my attention. Show after show after show. The television became the roommate I had not invited but apparently needed. The noise of other people’s stories standing in for the noise of my own life in New York. And for a while that worked.

Then I ran out of things to watch. And the quiet was still there. Waiting.

I moved out to the balcony.

Started reading. Drinking my water. Listening to the birds. Watching the leaves move with the wind. And somewhere in the middle of all of that ordinary stillness I started doing something I had never done before.

I put the book down.

Not because I was finished. Not because I was bored. Because something outside of me was more interesting than anything inside the pages. The sky. The air. The particular quality of quiet that exists in a place where nobody is honking or talking or asking anything of you.

I just sat in it.

And then I started to realize that the quiet was not empty. It was full of me. Full of thoughts I rarely heard because I almost never stopped making enough noise to hear them. Full of feelings I had never named because there had always been someone else’s energy in the room competing with mine.

For the first time in a long time, I was curious about myself. Not in a searching way. Not anxiously. In the way you get curious about something that genuinely interests you. I wanted to know what I was thinking. What I was feeling. With no one to compare it to. No outside voice to validate or contradict it. Just me and whatever was actually true inside of me.

That was new.

Here is what fell away in the quiet.

The wanting of company. Not people. I love people. But the compulsive reaching for external presence. The habit of filling every available space with someone else’s energy because my own had never had enough room to fully breathe. That fell away.

The wanting of more. Not ambition. Not desire. The restless, relentless wanting of more things, more experiences, more movement, more proof that life was happening. I stopped wanting more because I was soaking in what I already had. The peace. The ease. The comfort in my own body and with my own body. The air. The breeze. The birds. It was more than I had ever noticed before. And more than I had ever needed.

The wanting of a romantic partner also got quiet. Not gone. Just repositioned. It moved from my to do list to my “let it discover me” list. Which is an entirely different relationship with desire. One is chasing. The other is allowing.

What I discovered I had been chasing before North Carolina that I never actually wanted was a life filled with things to do.

What I found on that balcony was that I wanted a life filled with things to be.

That distinction did not arrive as an epiphany. It arrived while I was looking at the sky on my balcony. Not doing anything. Not trying to feel anything. And it arrived anyway. That was more than enough.

The quiet did not change me.

It opened up the conversation about me with me and only me.

And once you have met yourself in that way, really met yourself, without the noise and the comparison and the outside interference, you stop wanting the things you were never really after in the first place.

You just want more of this.

Whatever this is for you.

Find it. Then stay there long enough to hear what it has to say.

I did not turn it off.

Not because I was certain they would come back. Because something in me just was not ready to call it. And somewhere in that third quarter, watching them claw back point by point, I had a thought that had nothing to do with basketball.

There is no buzzer on the things you actually want.

I have been thinking about my body lately.

Not in the way we are taught to think about our bodies. Not from the outside looking in with a critical eye and a list of things that need fixing. From the inside. From the place of a woman who knows what her body feels like when it is most fully itself. When it is strong and light and moving through the world the way it was built to move.

I have been in that body before. Over twenty five years ago. And I can feel her again. Not as a memory. As something approaching. Getting closer. About to turn a bend where I can finally see her.

I have a friend’s wedding coming. I am her maid of honor. Summer is here. And those kinds of things add a particular kind of texture to the wanting.

Here is what I have noticed.

When you want something and you cannot see it yet it can make you question yourself. It can make you wonder if the desire itself is a kind of lie your body is telling you about yourself. Make you ask whether wanting something you do not currently have means you do not fully love where you are.

I do not believe that. And I do not think I ever did.

Feeling for the thing you want is not evidence that you are missing it.

It is confirmation that it is yours.

The vision of yourself in that body, in your life, in a relationship, in that level of abundance, is not your imagination taunting you. It is your body showing you what it already knows is coming. The same body that knew my wasband’s soul across a room before he knew I existed. The same body that feels the energy of something good approaching before it turns a bend where I can see it.

Your body does not show you things to be cruel.

It shows you things because they belong to you.

So what is the buzzer actually about.

It is the gap. The one between wanting something and doing the thing that gets you there. And here is what gets on my nerves about that gap. The only thing standing in it is me. Which means I cannot blame traffic or the weather or Mercury in retrograde. Just me. Standing between myself and the thing I already know is mine.

And the reason that gap exists in 2026 is very different from why it existed when I was growing up.

When I was a kid the only way I could find out what my friends were up to was to see them in school, go over their house if homework was done and our parents allowed it, or call them on the phone if my mother was not already on it talking to my aunt. There were built in barriers everywhere. Those barriers kept you focused on yourself. On what you were feeling. What you were doing. What you actually felt like doing next.

Not anymore.

As long as your wrist bends even a tiny bit and one finger works you can be distracted for days. Your phone. Your TV. Your laptop. Your tablet. Millions of people you have never met living lives you can watch in real time instead of living your own. The barriers are gone. All of the work of staying focused on yourself is now entirely on you.

Which brings me back to the Knicks.

When they played in San Antonio ninety percent of that crowd was deeply and enthusiastically dedicated to distracting them. Noise. Taunting. Everything a hostile crowd can offer. And those men individually and collectively ignored all of it. They stayed in their game. They stayed focused on what they were there to do. And they won.

That is the only skill that matters right now. And for you, right now is always.

Motivation is cool. Discipline in the traditional sense is helpful. But it is the practice of staying in your own game when everything around you is designed to pull you out of it that matters most.

Here is what I want you to sit with honestly. And I say this with love and a little bit of a side eye because I am saying it to myself too.

What are you doing right now to close the gap?

Not last week. Not next month. Right now. Today. This morning. This hour.

Because there is no buzzer. No point at which the game is called and the thing you wanted is officially no longer available to you. Time is not the problem. The distraction is the problem. And the distraction is optional.

The game is not over.

It has never been over.

There is no buzzer on the things that are already yours.

Put the phone down. Stay in your game.

Groceries in the cart. Card in my hand. And for the first time in a long time I did not do the thing I used to do before I swiped. The mental math. The quick check. The quiet calculation of whether what was in that cart was going to be okay or whether I needed to put something back.

I just swiped.

And in that moment, standing in that supermarket with nobody watching and nothing remarkable happening, I thought about Jay Z.

Not because we are friends. Not because we run in the same circles or have anything close to the same financial situation. But because I was suddenly certain of one thing.

I am pretty sure he has not had to check his balance before checking out in a very long time. And standing in that supermarket on that day, I didn’t think twice about it.

I was having the exact same experience he was having during his purchase somewhere in the city or in the world.

I wasn’t thinking about his money. I was experiencing his freedom.

Different zip code. Different tax bracket. Same feeling. Same experience.

And that, I realized, was exactly what I had been after the whole time.

I learned about vision boards years ago like a lot of people did.

The general idea was simple enough. Think about the things you desire that feel out of reach. Find images that represent them. Put them somewhere you can see them. And somehow the seeing of them helps call them in.

I did it. And as I did it I started noticing two things that nobody had told me about.

The first thing was how much we skip.

We put the big things on the board. The house. The car. The career. The relationship. And we completely ignore the small things that make everyday life feel like a life worth living. The socks that make you smile when you look down at your feet. The silverware that feels good in your hand when you use it. The soap that smells exactly right. What you want to see out of your window when you wake up in the morning. The quality of light in a room you spend a lot of time in.

Nobody tells you to put those things on the board. Well, I do. Because those things are the texture of a life. And a life without texture is just a list of accomplishments that never quite feels like enough.

The second thing I noticed was even bigger.

What you put on the board should not just represent what you want. It should represent what you want to be doing and how you want to feel when you are doing it.

Not the item. The experience of having it.

Here is what I discovered in real time standing in that supermarket.

Everything we want is because we are chasing a feeling we believe having that thing will bring us. The feeling was always the goal. The feeling was always the whole point.

Once I understood that everything changed about how I asked for what I wanted.

I stopped asking for things and started asking for experiences. I stopped putting images of objects on my board and started asking myself how I wanted my existence to feel. What did I want my mornings to feel like. What did I want my work to feel like. What did I want it to feel like when I was buying my groceries.

Free. Easy. A casual confident knowing. The kind that says I have what I need for what I want. Not loud. Not dramatic. Just settled.

And one afternoon, all at once, in a Bronx supermarket, that freedom made itself known to me.

I never had my sights set on his money. But what clicked in that moment was that I had always been seeking the experience I could clearly see his life was offering him. And there I was. Having it. In a supermarket he will never visit, on a block he has probably never been on, living in a version of that feeling that was entirely and specifically mine.

This is what I want you to take into your next ask. Whatever it is you are moving toward right now.

Get specific about the feeling. Not the title. Not the number in the account. Not the image you cut out of a magazine.

The feeling you believe having those things will give you.

That feeling is available to you before the thing arrives. Once you start living in the feeling you stop white knuckling the timeline. You stop checking your vision board like a lottery ticket. You start noticing when what you asked for is already showing up in places you almost walked past.

My asks have never been the same since.

Neither have the answers.

Not because I wasn’t paying attention. I believe I’m always paying attention. I just didn’t have the clarity or the language yet. And without the language you will keep calling the feeling by the biggest word you know and wonder why things fall apart once the feeling changes.

The word most of us reach for is love.

And a lot of the time what we actually mean is something else entirely.

There was a relationship I was in where I was certain it was love.

We had fun together. Real fun. The kind that made a Tuesday night feel like a summer vacation. There were things I discovered about myself when I was with him. Parts of me that got unlocked in his presence that I had never met before. I loved those parts. I loved finding them. I loved who I was in those moments.

And I called all of that loving him.

What I eventually had to reckon with was this. There were things about who he was at his core that were simply the polar opposite of who I am at mine. Not bad things necessarily. Just different things. Foundational things. The kind of differences that do not iron themselves out over time. They just get louder as the novelty wears off and what is underneath comes to the surface.

And when the novelty wore off what I found was not love of him. It was love of myself in discovery. The love of the experience. The love of what I was unlocking about who I was while he and I were doing life together.

That was a real and beautiful thing. It just is not the same thing as loving a person.

Here is what I had not learned at that point.

What you are feeling in the beginning of something new is often not love of the other person. It is love of yourself finding new things. Love of the unlocking. Love of the fun, the comfort and the familiar ease that builds between two people who are enjoying each other.

That is all as it should be. There is nothing wrong with any of it.

The problem comes when we label it “love of the other person” before we have actually had experiences that allows us to truly know them. Because the moment we put that label on it, something shifts. We start calling in expectations that were never necessary for the fun and discovery we were actually having. We start offering parts of ourselves to a situation that never called for it. We start building something permanent on top of what was always meant to be seasonal.

Love is not required for new things. Love is not required for fun things. Love is not required for discovering things. And when we put that label on something before it has earned it we do ourselves a particular kind of harm. We give the experience more of us than it deserves.

I have had this happen in friendships too.

A friendship where I thought we had the same understanding of what it meant to be connected. What I discovered over time was that she was my friend because of what being connected to me gave her access to. The places. The experiences. The authentic companionship. That is definitely a part of what friendships have to offer.

But what I noticed was that she never checked in on me. She checked in with me to see what was next. She never asked how I was doing or whether I needed anything. Our conversations always started with her or found their way back to her.

She called me her best friend.

What she loved was the access. Not me.

And I had been calling it friendship the whole time because friendship was the biggest word I had for the time we were spending together.

Here is what I know now.

Novelty has a feeling. Comfort has a feeling. And so does fun and discovery. All of those feelings are good and worth having and enjoying for exactly what they are.

They’re just not love. Not yet. Maybe not ever.

When we rush to label them love we skip the most important question. Is love actually what is growing here? Because what we might have is something wonderful and seasonal. Something worth honoring for what it is. Not inflating into something it was never going to become.

Enjoy the new thing and the fun. Enjoy who you are when you are in the presence of someone who unlocks something in you.

Just do not hand over the parts of you that belong to love until love is actually what is happening.

You will know the difference.

Your body has always known the difference.

You just have to be willing to call it what it is.

Nobody had to. I watched it every day in the house I grew up in. Not the greeting card version. Not the version that requires everything to be going well. The real one. The kind that shows up in the ordinary moments between people who have chosen each other through a life that did not always cooperate.

Stay with me on this one. I promise it is simpler than it sounds and more layered than you might expect.

My parents gave me that. And I want to share it with you NOT so you can measure what you had against it but so you can recognize it wherever it showed up in your own life. A grandparent. A friend. A teacher. A cousin. It lives in more places than we sometimes stop to notice.

My father was the greatest example of loving you despite how ridiculous you might be.

He had hopes for me. For my mom. For my sister. For my cousin. My aunt. Everyone he loved. But not expectations. There is a difference and he lived it. Expectations come with conditions attached. You do this and I will feel that way about you. Hopes are simpler. I believe in who you are becoming and I am going to be here for it.

He was proud of the great things. Genuinely, visibly, uncontainably proud. And he was entertained by the foolish ones. Not in a dismissive way. In the way of a man who understood that people are messy and life is messier and none of that changes how you feel about someone you love.

He knew that. He lived that. And without knowing it he handed it to me.

My mother was a different kind of teacher.

She would get mad. She would absolutely let you know when she disagreed with a choice you made or a direction you were headed. She was not quiet about it and she was not pretending everything was fine when it was not.

But she never withdrew. And she still doesn’t.

That is the part I want to sit with for a moment because I think it is more rare than we acknowledge. A lot of love comes with invisible strings attached. Behave in a way I approve of and I will show you warmth. Disappoint me and I will pull back until you course correct. It looks like love from the outside. It functions like a negotiation.

My mother’s love did not work that way. I could have the full weight of her disapproval and still feel completely held by her at the same time. She never made me choose between her love and my own choices. She gave me both. The honesty and the warmth. The correction and the continued presence.

That is not a small thing. That is everything.

And then there were four of us.

What I had in that house was not just two parents modeling something beautiful. It was a full equation. I got to watch my father love my mother and my sister. And I got to participate in him loving me. I got to watch my mother love my sister and my father. And I got to participate in my mother loving me.

Between just the four of us I had every angle covered.

It was like a quantum physics equation. A four dimensional look at how easy love can be and how joyful it can be despite not being fully aligned with the choices of the people you are loving. My sister and I replicated what we watched between our parents. We loved each other the same way. Showed up for each other the same way. It was not something we decided to do. It was just what we had learned love was.

As kids we had no awareness of how rare it was for people to experience it or even recognize it when they had it. We were well aware that some of our friends’ and even some family members’ households did not feel like ours. We did not take for granted that what we had was not as accessible for many.

Now here is the part my parents were also very clear about.

Loving people as they are does not mean staying in every relationship regardless of how it feels. My parents taught us that people can show up messy or in contrast to what feels good or right to you. Sometimes that is just who they are. Sometimes it is who they are choosing to be in that season. And when they do and you feel harmed, hurt or consistently uncomfortable in relationship to them, that relationship needs to change. You put distance between you and them and send them on with the wish of them doing well on whatever journey they are on without you.

My parents were not about loving people even when it hurts you. Not even a little bit.

Together they showed me something I did not have language for until much later.

Love is not a reward. It is not something you earn by being impressive or lose by being human. It does not require you to get everything right or even most things right. It just requires you to be in relationship with someone who has decided that who you are is worth showing up for consistently without being consistently or repeatedly harmful.

LL Cool J explained this way of loving when he said I want a girl with extensions in her hair, bamboo earrings at least two pair, a Fendi bag and a bad attitude. Everything she was showing up in, the trends, the edge, the Bronx gruffness and in her fullness, was all he needed to be in a good mood.

That is the blueprint my parents laid down before I ever heard that song.

See the person underneath everything they show up in. Love them there. And when who they are stops feeling good to be around, send them on with love and let them go.

I took that in without knowing I was taking it in. It became my baseline. My first understanding of what love is supposed to feel like from the inside.

And now that I am in a season of welcoming someone new into my life I can feel how much that foundation shaped what I am feeling for. Someone who has hopes for me but not expectations. Someone who will be proud of the great things and entertained by the foolish ones. Someone whose love does not come with invisible strings I have to keep untangling. Someone who can disagree with me this afternoon and still make me feel completely held by tonight.

Every relationship I have been in, romantic, platonic, even family, felt exactly like that until the point when some of them did not. Some ended because life changed shape and we sent each other on with love. Some ended because who they were becoming was no longer good for me to be around.

I have been single for a long time. Not because I forgot that this kind of love was available to me. That has never been the reason. I have been single because I have been in a love affair with myself. And I loved myself so well and for so long that who I am now feels like someone I am willing to share. Something worth inviting someone else into.

I did come across loves that asked me to be less messy, less myself, more manageable.

I left those loves right there at the door of their demands.

And I am glad I did. I would hate to have cut this journey short.

Not in an anxious way. In the way you take inventory before a trip you have been looking forward to. Checking what is in the bag. Making sure you have everything you need. Making sure you are not leaving anything important behind.

What I keep coming back to is this.

I have never been in a relationship. Not this version of me. Every relationship I have ever been in belonged to an earlier edition of me. A woman who had not yet chosen her own peace consistently. Who had not yet learned what her own ease felt like when nobody was disrupting it.

This version of me is new to this. And I find that equal parts thrilling and worth paying attention to.

Here is what I know about myself right now.

I am protective of what I have built. Not in a guarded way. More like the way you are careful with something you worked hard to grow. The peace I live in did not come with my apartment. I made it. I chose it every morning. I decided how I wanted my day to feel. I tended to it every time I said no to what disrupted it and yes to what fed it.

Here is how I did that (I really don’t like when people tell you they did something awesome but don’t share they did it). I paid attention to what felt good or exciting or of interest to me. I could feel it in my body. My chest. My stomach. It was the things I could not help but smile at. And I paid equal attention to what did not feel right, like the things that made me frown or sigh without meaning to. For the good stuff I said yes and I did so at the expense of anything standing between me and that thing. For the not good stuff I said no. No explanation. Just no.

The pleasure, the ease, the freedom and the flexibility I move through my days with became how I live.

I am not interested in negotiating any of that away.

And here is the part that used to feel like a contradiction but does not anymore.

I want to share every single bit of it.

The peace. The pleasure. The ease. The freedom. All of the things I am most protective of are exactly the things I most want to welcome someone into. I do not want a partner who exists alongside my life. I want one who gets to live inside it with me. And I want to feel just as much like myself inside of his life.

That is not a contradiction. That is what it feels like to be ready.

I want to say something about the difference between connection and companionship because I think it matters and we don’t talk about it enough.

Companionship is presence. Someone to have dinner with. Someone to call when something happens. Someone to split the silence with so it does not feel so large. Companionship is not nothing. But it is not what I am looking for.

Connection is different. Connection is the thing that makes you feel known. Not observed. Appreciated for existing, not for doing. It is the conversation that picks up in the middle. It’s when your comfort (or discomfort) doesn’t require explanation. Being exactly who you are with someone who finds exactly who you are to be the most comfortable and nourishing place to rest their soul.

I am not praying for someone to keep me company.

I am looking for someone I cannot help but want to show up for. Someone whose wellbeing sits in my chest alongside the people I love most in this world. Someone whose presence in my life feels less like an addition and more like a homecoming.

And I want him to feel that way about me.

Not because I earned it through effort. Because something in who I am called to something in who he is and neither of us can explain it and we don’t need to.

What I want most I could not have named five years ago.

The desire was there and yet I did not know it was available to me. I did not yet know that a relationship could feel like freedom instead of compromise. That someone could be compelled to contribute to my joy rather than occasionally accommodating it. That time together under any circumstance could feel like one of the top three places either of us wanted to be on any given day.

I know what this forthcoming relationship will feel like. Not as a concept or something I am reaching for. It is something that will match how I feel on the inside. It’s that mastered art of self-care that feels so native to my spirit. I know he will match that. I am expecting it. I have learned to allow the version of love that matches the life I have already built for myself.

I am clear about what I want. Not rigid. Clear. I am not demanding. I am not difficult.

I have never been in a relationship. Not this version of me.

But I know exactly what I am feeling for. Not looking for. Feeling for. Because what I am ready for can be felt whether my eyes are open or closed.

I am ready and excited and unhurried all at the same time.

I am allowed to be all of those things at once.

So are you.

Filtering by price. Sorting from lowest to highest. Talking myself through a connection in Charlotte like it was reasonable. Like the extra two hours in an airport was a trade worth making. Like I didn’t already know which airline I wanted, which route I wanted, what I was actually willing to pay for.

I had the money. That is the part I am still processing.

I was not choosing the connecting flight because I could not afford the direct one. I was choosing it because something quiet, well dressed, and completely unbothered told me to be smart about it. To be responsible. To not spend more than you have to.

And I almost listened. The way I have almost listened a hundred times before in a hundred different ways about a hundred different things that were about more and less than plane tickets.

My father did not raise me with a ceiling.

Young me (pre-slippin’) with my direct flight ticket in hand.

I want to be clear about that because it matters to everything I am about to say. He did not just tell me I had no limits. He took me places, put me in rooms and gave me experiences that proved it before I was old enough to argue with the evidence. The woman I became knows how to walk into any room. She does not shrink at a table. She does not apologize for the space she takes up.

In most areas of my life I do not think in limits. I genuinely do not.

But money got through.

Not loudly. Not in ways that were obvious enough to catch early. Money conditioning does not come for you with a sign that says “I am here to make you small.” It comes dressed as practicality. As wisdom. As being the kind of person who does not waste what she has worked hard for. It sounds so reasonable that you do not question it. You just filter by price and tell yourself you are being responsible and book the connecting flight and lose two hours of your life in Charlotte.

Here is what I have come to understand about the sneaky kind of limit.

It does not show up when you are struggling. It shows up when you have the money and you still choose less. It shows up in how you price your work for a corporate client who has a real budget and will pay what you ask...if you ask for it. That is a quiet negotiation you have with yourself before you name a number, the one where you talk yourself down from what you actually want to something that feels safer to say out loud.

It shows up every time you choose the version of a thing that costs less than what you really want because what you actually want feels like too much. Or at least that is what you tell yourself.

Your soul wants to know who decided that.

My father gave me something most people never receive. Not the speech. The proof. And even with all of that exposure and experience, societal conditioning (the kind aimed specifically at women) found a crack and slipped through. Still managed to make a woman who was raised without limits pause at the price of a direct flight she could afford and almost talk herself into the long way around.

That is how old and practiced this particular noise is.

But here is what is also true.

I caught it. And catching it is key. This means something shifted. It means the woman my father raised is still in the room and she is paying attention now in ways she was not before. Every time I book the direct flight. Every time I name the number I actually mean. Every time I price my work at what it is worth instead of what feels safe to say, I feel valued by me. I feel like I am making my father proud. I feel free.

Not loudly. But in the same quiet way the limit showed up in the first place.

The conditioning got in through a crack. And I am closing it. One direct flight at a time.

The ceiling was never mine.

I borrowed it long enough to forget it did not belong to me.

I am giving it back.

Same path. About ten thousand steps. In the sun, the cold, the wind, the heat, the rain. I felt completely at home in all of it. That is probably because the walk stopped being about the weather a long time ago. It stopped being about the steps too.

It became the place where I meet myself.

It did not start that way. In the beginning I used those walks to stay connected. My sisters. My friends. The people I love most filling my ears while my feet moved and the world passed quietly around me. It felt productive. Efficient even. Movement and connection all wrapped into the first hour of my morning.

But at some point the talking started to compete with something else that was trying to get my attention.

So I got quiet. One morning I just did not make the call. The next morning I did not make it either. Somewhere in the silence the walk became a completely different experience. Not empty. Fuller. Like I had been streaming something on low volume for years and finally turned it up.

What I found in that quiet was not what I expected.

I expected peace. I got that. I expected clarity. Got that too. What I did not expect was the feeling of a woman surfacing inside me that I recognized immediately and yet somehow had never properly met.

I am not who I was before my solitude. My body knew it before my mind caught up. Before I had words for what was shifting, I could already feel it.

That is what self trust actually feels like when it gets sturdy enough.

It stops living in your head and starts living in your body. It stops being something you decide and starts being something you sense. You become less invested in what things are supposed to look like and more connected to what they actually feel like as they arrive. Your energy opens. Not frantically. Not desperately. The way you open a window on a morning when the air outside is exactly right and you think to yourself — yes, let that in.

I want to say something honest about the noise.

The noise was never the problem. Your soul signals through all of it. Through the opinions, the concern, the well meaning advice, the cultural expectations and the committee meetings that nobody scheduled but everybody showed up to anyway. Your soul has been transmitting through all of that this whole time.

Your body has been receiving it too.

The flat tire you interpreted as a coincidence. The man you felt sitting beside you on a rainy afternoon before he ever arrived. The godmother you chose for your child before he was born and then second guessed. The solitude you decided on before you ever said it out loud.

Your body knew. Every single time.

You just kept asking everybody else.

Here is what I have come to understand about outsourcing your own knowing.

It is not a character flaw. It is not weakness. It is what happens when you have been living in the noise long enough that your own signal starts to feel unfamiliar. When your voice becomes the one you trust least in a room full of people who love you and are absolutely certain they know what you need.

But your soul has never been confused about where you are going.

Neither has your body.

They have been in conversation with each other this whole time. Working out the details. Laying the pathway. Sending you signals through ordinary moments you almost talked yourself out of trusting.

You had full bars the whole time.

The only thing that was ever in the way was the noise you kept choosing over the signal you already had.

This is the final piece in Stop Outsourcing Your Own Knowing. Start from the beginning with The Flat Tire Was Not a Sign, if you want to make sure you are listening to your voice first.

P.S. If you need help deciding on a thing or two, Just Two Things is still open. Here’s the link: https://bit.ly/JustTwoThings

I was on my sofa. Binging a show. Lime water on the table beside me. And somewhere in the middle of all that ordinary comfort I felt him.

Not saw. Not imagined. Felt.

Him on that sofa with me. The show playing. Both of us commenting on it the way people do when they are relaxed enough with each other to say the thing they are actually thinking. Peaceful. Happy. The kind of ease you can only bring to someone else after you have already found it in yourself. It lasted a split second and it was so visceral and so specific that I sat with it after it passed and thought… Oh. So that is what I am moving toward.

Not the idea of partnership. Not the concept of it. That. Exactly that. Rain and lime water and someone whose presence on my sofa feels like home.

Here is what I want to think out loud about with you today.

I have been praying for partnership. Lightly. In the quiet moments when I am honest enough with myself to admit that the desire is real and growing. I have been sending that prayer out into the Universe the way you send something fragile in the mail. Carefully. With a lot of protective wrapping. Not entirely sure it will arrive in one piece.

And underneath that prayer, running parallel to it like a second conversation I did not fully mean to start, is something else.

A question. A hesitation. A not so secret concern that sits right alongside this desire without canceling it out.

I have not been in a romantic partnership in a long time. And I am not the same woman I was the last time I was. The woman who lived alone. Who chose her space deliberately and filled it with plants and midday baths and balcony mornings on a rainy Tuesday. She has never been in a relationship. This version of me. And I am about to introduce her to someone for the first time.

That feels daunting.

It also feels like an adventure.

Both of those things are true at the same time and I have decided to let them be.

I want to be clear about something because I think it matters.

I have not forgotten how to be in a romantic partnership. That is not the concern. The concern is that I have never gotten to know someone else while simultaneously getting to know this particular version of me. Every relationship I have ever been in belonged to an earlier version of me. A woman who had not yet chosen herself the way I have chosen myself. Who had not yet lived in the full quiet of her own company long enough to know what she actually sounds like when nobody else is in the room.

That woman is who I am bringing into this next chapter.

And the only place some of my questions about her can be answered is in relationship with someone else. Which is both the most exciting and most vulnerable thing I have said out loud in a while.

So what am I actually praying for?

I am praying for the rain and the sofa and the lime water. I am praying for someone whose presence feels like home before it feels like effort. Someone whose curiosity about who I am is only outmatched by our curiosity about who we will become.

I am not praying for perfect. I am not praying for easy. I am praying for real. For the kind of connection that feels like continuing a conversation you have both been committed to for lifetimes even though you are technically just getting started.

And I am praying with both hands this time.

Not one hand reaching out and the other quietly bracing.

Both hands. Open. Ready.

The desire is real. The readiness is growing. And that feels like enough for right now.

This was Part Four of Stop Outsourcing Your Own Knowing.

P.S. If you need help deciding on a thing or two, Just Two Things is still open. Here’s the link: https://bit.ly/JustTwoThings

Not the silence of waiting for someone to stir in the next room. Not the silence of being the first one up. The silence of a home that was entirely, unambiguously mine. No one to check on. No one to coordinate with. No one whose morning I needed to consider before I considered my own.

I made my tea and I went to my balcony.

The curtains out there were moving lightly in the morning breeze. The birds were doing what birds do in the early morning hours. My lo-fi music was playing softly. No lyrics. Just sound. And I sat there in all of that and felt the full exhale of a decision that had been a long time coming.

I had done it.

I had never lived alone. Not one single solitary day of my life. Which felt like information.

The balcony moment began a few years before as my youngest son was nearing the start of college and I could feel the shift coming. Something in me started getting clear about what I wanted next. Not what made sense. Not what was expected. What I actually wanted. And the most clarifying and persistent thought I had was this.

I want a space that is entirely my own.

I want to wake up and move through my home on my own schedule, in my own order, at my own pace without negotiating any of it with another human being. I want to watch what I want, take a bath midday without explanation and put plants in every available floor and shelf space I can find. I want silence when I want silence and music when I want music and company when I want company and the door closed to all of it when I want that instead.

So I decided. Quietly. Firmly. Without a public announcement or a group text.

A space of my own was next.

Now here is the part I want to think out loud about with you.

The people in my life who love me had feelings about this decision. Feelings they shared with me in the way people who love you share things. With concern. With questions. With the gentle but persistent suggestion that maybe what I actually needed was a partner. Someone to share the time with me. Someone to look out for me. Someone to make my life look more like the life they had in mind for me.

I understand that. I come from a culture where partnering is a priority. Where a home of your own is supposed to mean a home you are building with someone.

And here is what I want you to notice.

I was not confused by their concern. I was not moved by it either. Not because they were wrong to care. But because I had already decided. The decision was not up for revision. It was not a rough draft.

It was done. I was just waiting for life to catch up to what I already knew.

That is what it feels like to have already decided.

It is not loud. It is not defiant. It is not a declaration you make to the room so everyone knows where you stand. It is quieter than that. It feels like knowing something so completely that the opinions around you become elevator music rather than information you actually need.

People who love you will have feelings about your decisions. That is what love does. It makes people feel like they have a seat at the table of your life even when the table only has one chair.

You do not have to remove them from the room. You just have to be clear about whose decision it actually is.

I have been living alone for a few years now. And something is shifting again.

I can feel it the way I felt the original pull toward solitude. Clear. Quiet. Sure. I think I am nearing the full satisfaction of what I came here for. The chapter of having my time entirely to myself has given me everything I knew it would and even a few delightful things I did not expect. And I feel something new starting to stir. The desire to share again. Not out of loneliness. Not out of pressure. But out of genuine readiness. Out of fullness rather than vacancy.

The people around me just got used to my living alone.

They may be about to get a new decision to adjust to.

And I say that with all the love in my heart and zero apology in my voice. Because the only thing that has ever mattered in any of this is me having what I want when I want it.

Not a moment before. Not a moment after.

My time. Set to my timezone. My pace. My peace.

This was Part Three of Stop Outsourcing Your Own Knowing.

P.S. If you need help deciding on a thing or two, Just Two Things is still open. This link will tell you everything you need to know: https://bit.ly/JustTwoThings

Not perfectly. Not without their own stuff going on. But naturally. Like loving me was not a decision they made but a response to who I am.

I want to think out loud about that for a minute because I think it is one of the most important things we never talk about directly.

There is a difference between someone who gravitates toward you and someone who gravitates toward what you do for them. Most of us have felt both. Most of us know the difference in our bodies even when we struggle to name it out loud. And most of us have spent time in the wrong category longer than we should have because we kept hoping the feeling would change.

It does not change. But that is not what I want us to think about together.

I want to start with Row.

(Names in this piece have been changed.)

Row was my boyfriend in high school. And what I remember most about him was not the romance of being young and figuring each other out, although that was real and it was good. What I remember most is that he paid attention to ME. Not to the idea of me. Not to what having me around did for his reputation or his mood or his weekend plans. To me. The actual person.

I was not feeling well once and without a lot of conversation about it he took me to his family home, let me rest in his room and asked his uncle to make me homemade soup. And his uncle did. We were in high school. Nobody assigned him that. Nobody taught him that was what I needed. He was simply paying close enough attention to know and was motivated enough by his care for me to act on what he knew.

I want us to sit with that.

He did not need instructions because he was already watching. He did not need a manual because understanding me felt good to him. Meeting my needs was not a task he completed. It was an expression of something he already felt. And the same was true in the other direction. I loved him the same way. Effortlessly. Because when someone’s spirit and energy feel good to you, loving them does not feel like work. It feels like the most natural thing in the world.

That is what gravitating toward someone looks like.

Then there is Rhonda.

I met Rhonda at work. We did not even work together very long but from almost the first moment there was a pull. A sisterly recognition that I did not have to manufacture or convince myself into. We just fit. And when the job ended the friendship did not. We showed up for each other through the years, through weddings and baby showers and all the in between moments that tend to reveal pretty quickly who is yours and who was just visiting.

When I was pregnant I was privately turning something over in my mind. I had a friend I had known for years. A good friend. The kind of history that feels like it earns a title. And then there was Rhonda. A woman I had met at work, someone I had not known nearly as long, but someone whose place in my life had always felt like more than the calendar could explain.

I was thinking about making Rhonda his godmother. The pull toward that decision felt exactly like the pull I felt when I first met her. Clear. Quiet. Sure.

And then I went with someone else. Because history felt safer than instinct. And I let that win.

My son was born on her birthday. The Universe confirmed what my instincts already knew. I just was not listening closely enough to either of them.

And then there is Rob.

Rob seemed interested in me. He presented himself as someone who wanted to know me, be close to me, build something with me. And for a while I let myself believe that the presentation was the reality.

But at some point I got honest with myself about what I was actually watching.

Rob was not interested in me. He was interested in being seen with me. In having access to my intelligence when he needed a sounding board. In what it felt like to have me nearby. He was gravitating toward what I provided, not toward who I was. And there is a significant difference between those two things even when they look similar from the outside.

The relationship ended quietly. The way steam evaporates over a hot pot. I never felt the need to make my exit louder than my welcome.

I want you to notice something about those three relationships.

Row never needed to be asked. Rhonda never needed to be recruited. The connection with both of them had a quality that I can only describe as inevitable. Like it was already in motion before either of us made a conscious decision about it.

With Rob everything required effort. And effort that does not come from magnetic love is always a short story.

Here is what I know about the people who genuinely gravitate toward you.

They cannot help it. Something about who you are activates something in them and the caring that follows is not an obligation. It is a response. Loving you feels good to them. Learning you feels good to them. They do not need a reason to stay. You are the reason. And when it is real, the sync feels just as effortless on your end.

Those are the people who deserve your attention and your access.

Not because everyone else is bad or wrong or unworthy of kindness. But because your attention and your access are not unlimited resources. And the people who receive them should be the ones where it feels like you are both continuing a conversation you have been committed to for lifetimes.

Not because you were useful. Not because you were impressive. Not because you filled a space they needed filled. Because you. Just you. You were enough to draw them in without an invitation.

Pay attention to who those people are in your life.

And then give them everything.

P.S. If you missed my note yesterday about Just Two Things, it’s still open. Here’s the link: https://bit.ly/JustTwoThings

Neither one particularly wants to go. They said yes out of obligation, out of love for the host, out of not wanting to be the person who always cancels. But in the car, on the way there, you could feel the low-grade resistance. The energy of people doing a thing they’ve already mentally checked out of before they even arrived.

And then. A flat tire.

One friend exhales like she just got a pardon from the governor. Lol!

“This is a sign. We were not supposed to go to that party.”

The other friend nods slowly, looking relieved and a little too comfortable with that conclusion.

“I think we got the flat tire to stop us from something worse down the road.”

Now. Same two friends. Different night. Different party. This time they cannot wait to get there. The food is going to be incredible. The music is going to be good. There is someone they have been wanting to see. They are dressed. They smell good. They are already laughing before they even pull out of the driveway.

And yet again…a flat tire.

Same friends. Same voices. Completely different energy.

“This is a sign. Something is trying to slow us down but we are going to fix this tire and get to that party because the Universe did not put this outfit together for nothing.”

The other friend nods.

You see what just happened there?

Same tire problem. Similar party plans. Two completely different signs. And neither friend paused to question their interpretation for even half a second. They were too busy being right.

Here is what I want to offer you today, and I am going to need you to sit with this honestly.

We do not look for signs to find answers.

We look for signs to find permission.

There is a difference. A significant one. And once you see it you cannot unsee it, which is both a gift and a mild inconvenience.

When you already know what you want, you do not need a sign. You need courage. You need to trust the thing you already feel in your body. But courage is harder to come by than a flat tire, so we outsource the decision. We hand it to the Universe and say “you tell me”. And then we interpret whatever the Universe sends back through the lens of what we were already leaning toward anyway.

The bus being late is a sign. The song on the radio is a sign. The dream you had, the number you keep seeing, the random comment someone made while you were half listening is a sign. All of them pointing, conveniently, in whatever direction you were already facing before you left the house.

Loves, the Universe is not your Magic 8 Ball.

I am not saying synchronicity is not real. I am not saying the Universe is not communicating with you. I believe it absolutely is, all the time, and I take that seriously.

What I am saying is... You cannot recognize a sign clearly when you are using it as a substitute for your own knowing. That is not receiving guidance. That is confirmation bias with spiritual accessories.

When you genuinely trust yourself, signs become confirmation. They show up after the decision, not instead of it. They feel like a quiet nod from the Universe saying yes, you read the room correctly. They do not feel like a search party you sent out because you are afraid to trust what you already know.

My father told me to be outlandish with my asks. He believed his daughters could have everything they wanted, especially if they asked for it.

He also raised me to know my own mind. To not wait for the world to cosign what I already felt to be true. To walk into a room with my decision already made. Not arrogantly. Not without openness. But settled. Grounded. Not scanning the ceiling for a sign from above because I was too nervous to trust what was already living inside me.

That is the cosign you do not need.

Not because validation is not sometimes sweet. It absolutely is. But because as soon as you require it, you have already left yourself. You have handed your knowing over to the flat tire, the dream, the horoscope, the opinion of someone who has never spent a single day inside your life and honestly does not know your complete situation.

You know. You’ve always known. You knew before you started collecting signs.

The question is whether you trust yourself enough to stop searching and simply move.

Take a look at one decision you have been sitting on. Not because you lack information. But because you have been waiting for something outside of you to confirm what you already feel, know or desire.

Notice what signs you’ve been collecting.

Notice what they all seem to have in common.

And then ask yourself honestly whose answer you have actually been looking for?

I think you already know what you want. You have known for a while now.

You just have not decided yet that your own knowing is enough.

It is.

Part 2 of this series; Stop Outsourcing Your Own Knowing, we will get into: Drawn to You vs. Drawn To What You Do.