Homebody & Heart

I have not opened my real estate CRM in days. I started to re-landscape the front and back yard, got as far as dragging supplies out of the shed, and then migrated the whole project to Pinterest, where it will live indefinitely. ADHD landscaping is famously a Pinterest board, not a yard. I rearranged my bedroom in a way that has somehow made it worse. I cleaned out my car. I have considered, more than once, whether it would be reasonable to start a worm farm.

This is not productivity. This is avoidance with calluses and squeaky knees.

I had a moment a few days ago, standing in the middle of my newly destroyed bedroom, looking at a pile of clothes that used to be a different pile of clothes, when something clicked.

I have done this before.

Not the bedroom (although, also, the bedroom). The thing underneath the bedroom.

I am eyeing the prospect of becoming a full-time recluse who lives off microwaved corndogs and rotates between three sweatpants. I am, in short, beginning to disappear. According to Reddit, this means I am going through a self-diagnosed Dark Night of the Soul™. Symptoms include: intense feelings of emptiness, loss of meaning, disconnection, despair. Which, for me, translates to pulling away from people, ignoring messages, driving aimlessly in search of a place I can go work for the day, or at least that is what I tell myself (it means I am looking for something but I do not know what), and mentally drafting the listing for my own Hermit Era.

And I have done this before.

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The first time was in my late twenties, when I moved back to Tacoma from Seattle, freshly sober, dragging a duffel bag’s worth of shame about people I had been around and choices I had made and a version of myself I no longer wanted to be. I was so embarrassed by the previous chapter of my life that I could not bear to be seen.

So I stopped being seen.

I deleted social media (metaphorically speaking). I stopped going out. I stopped picking up the phone. I told myself I was healing.

Ten years of grief and recovery, but also ten years of avoidance. Ten years of staying small. Ten years of telling myself I was not ready, the timing was off, I needed to figure out a few more things first, maybe next month I would post something, maybe next year I would reach out. Ten years of waiting to feel like I deserved to be seen.

I do not get those years back.

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So here I am, in my late thirties, looking at a pile of clothes that used to be in a different pile of clothes, realizing I am about to do it again.

I left a difficult work situation about a month ago. It was the right call. It was also messy and complicated and full of feelings I did not expect, including some shame, even though I did the right thing. Shame, it turns out, is not a fact-checker. It does not care whether you actually did anything wrong. It just shows up wearing the same shoes it wore last time and asks if you would like to disappear for a while.

Lately I have been turning down plans. Hiding from my phone. Talking myself out of posting things. Quietly concluding that the safest move is to take up a little less space, just for now, just until I figure things out, just until the timing is better.

Which, again, is exactly what I did the last time. The exact same playbook, ten years later, with better posture and worse knees.

The difference, this time, is that I see it. Just barely. Just in time. Standing in a room I made worse trying to make it better, with a corndog in the freezer and a list of people I have not texted back, I caught it.

I am about to crawl into the hole.

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The hole is so familiar. The hole has good lighting and a charged phone and unlimited streaming. The hole says you can come back when you are ready, when you have your act together, when you can be sure nobody will be disappointed in you. The hole feels like rest.

The hole is not rest.

The hole is where another decade goes.

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My friend Heather, who I love, who tells me the truth and also makes me honk like a goose laughing, said something I have not been able to put down. She said: nothing will change until you are tired of your own shit.

I have been turning that one over. Wondering if I have hit that point yet. Wondering if the willingness to admit out loud, in writing, on the internet, that I have been considering a worm farm is itself a sign that I might be approaching the territory of being tired of my own shit.

Yeah. I’m there.

I am not going into the hole this time. That is not the same as feeling great. I am tired. I am embarrassed about things I do not have to be embarrassed about. I am writing this from the same bedroom I just made worse.

But I am writing it. I am posting it. I am choosing, today, in this small specific way, not to disappear.

Resting is not the hole. The hole is a story I tell myself about why I should not come out. I am not telling myself that story for another ten years.

If you are reading this and you have been quiet lately, withdrawn lately, smaller than usual lately: I see you. I know what that looks like from the inside. I know how reasonable it feels. I know how convincing the hole is.

But the hole is a liar.

I am not crawling in.