Homebody & Heart

Written on a post-it on my bedroom mirror:

I’m allowed to be new. I’m allowed to go slow. I’m allowed to take up space.

I wrote these a few months ago during what can only be described as a moment. I don’t remember what prompted it. I do remember thinking I’d read them every morning like a functional adult, absorb the wisdom, and transform into someone whose life is “intentional.” The post-it is still there, curling slightly at the corners, watching me brush my teeth and make questionable decisions.

Here’s the thing nobody tells you about starting something new in your late thirties: there’s a quiet pressure to already sound confident. To already know what you’re doing. To move faster than feels natural. To prove you belong before you’ve even figured out where the bathroom is.

I feel it in real estate, where “being new” means walking into unfamiliar rooms and pretending I’m not rehearsing my opening line like a one-woman play nobody bought tickets to. I feel it in motherhood, which I have been doing for four years and still Google basic questions about on a weekly basis. I feel it in sobriety, where almost ten years in, I still sometimes look at a bottle of kombucha like it might betray me.

I am new at a lot of things. Some of them I’ve been doing for years. That’s the part that’s weird.

For years I thought if I just moved fast enough and looked polished enough, nobody would notice I was still figuring it out. This was not the flex I thought it was. People have been gently watching me be new at things since I was 22. Like a nature documentary. “Here we see the young female attempting to perform competence. She has not slept. Observe as she confidently uses a term she heard twice and hopes nobody asks her to define.”

So I’m going slow now. Not because I had a revelation. Because fast wasn’t working and I couldn’t sustain it. Going slow means I remember what people actually said in a conversation instead of inventing a version of it later that makes me look better. It means I occasionally sit down in my own life instead of sprinting through it like I’m trying to catch a train I already missed.

Taking up space is the hardest one. I’ve spent years trying to take up less of it. Smaller voice. Smaller feelings. Smaller opinions about restaurants. The problem is I am not a small person. I am, in fact, a fully developed adult with thoughts, and every time I tried to shrink, the rest of me leaked out somewhere weird. Usually as eating string cheese in the dark at 11pm. Sometimes as getting weirdly invested in a stranger’s divorce I overheard at the coffee shop. Once, memorably, as telling a stranger at a party that I “just have a lot of feelings about ceramics.”

So here I am. Taking up space. Being new at things I’ve been doing for years. Going slow because fast was making me a worse version of myself. Writing this instead of rehearsing it. Existing in the room without apologizing for having opinions about ceramics or anything else.

If you’re new at something and tired of pretending you’re not: same. There is no secret club where everyone else has it figured out. I have checked. Repeatedly. With increasing desperation. It does not exist. It was a lie perpetuated by people who “wake up at 5am and don’t even need coffee” and people who post “day in my life” videos and make it look easy.

Pull up a chair. Don’t make yourself small. I saved you a seat.

You’re allowed to be here.
You’re allowed to take your time.
You’re allowed to take up space.