There are post-its all over my room.
Under my MacBook. Next to my monitor stand. On the dresser. In my sock drawer. In the pocket of a pair of pants that are folded into the not-so-dirty pile on the chair next to my dirty laundry basket. In my purse. In my painting supplies. Under my curling iron.
They’re everywhere but the floor.
This is a month of thoughts I did not want to forget.
The unknown doesn’t have to be a trigger.
If I constantly feel like shit after talking with someone, they are NOT my people.
It’s not a coincidence. If things are going well and someone always tries to bring you down, they’re not happy for you, they’re not celebrating your success. FYI.
Don’t change the cringey parts. Don’t throw away your bad art.
Not in survival mode. Living life. And it’s okay to say that out loud.
These are the highlights. There are others I am keeping to myself. There are a few I found this week that I cannot decode.
Someone I love was quiet with me for a few days. Not fighting. Not distant exactly. Just off. I asked if we were okay. She said “why wouldn’t we be.” That should have settled it. It did not.
For the next two days I was a mess.
The thoughts started the moment I woke up. Pit of my stomach. That flash of “oh no, what did I do.” I could not shake it. I would be driving and the thoughts would creep in. Working and the thoughts would creep in. Playing with my son, dodging our Newfoundland puppy who was chasing after us like a small bear with no braking system, and the thoughts would creep in. I tried to stay present. I would name it, breathe through it, move on, and then feel like shit again ten minutes later.
I was rehearsing apologies for things I could not identify, for a conversation that might never happen. My brain was writing checks nobody had asked me to cash.
It took me almost the full two days to realize the thing that was making me feel crazy was not the situation. It was not knowing what the situation was.
That is what I was allergic to. Not her, not what she may or may not have been feeling. The unknown itself. The gap between “something is off” and “here is what it is.” My whole body was trying to close that gap and it could not, because the information was not mine to have yet.
As soon as I named it, I settled.
The unknown doesn’t have to be a trigger.
I did not fix anything. I did not know anything new. She was still quiet. I still did not know what she was thinking. But I stopped feeling like I was going to come out of my skin. It was like turning the light on in a dark room and realizing the monster in the corner was just a coat rack with a hat and an umbrella hanging off it. The thing was still there. It just did not have power anymore.
Ten thousand times better. Immediately.
A woman I thought was a friend has been in my life for about a year. Same neighborhood. Kids around the same age as mine. Newer agent, like me. On paper, she is exactly the person I would want to be close to.
I helped her a lot. I wanted to. She was newer than me and I remembered how lost I had felt at the beginning. I showed her how to do a walkthrough. How to open a lockbox. How to have conversations with other agents. I gave her my flashcards to study for her licensing exam. I dropped what I was doing more than once when she needed something.
I was not tracking any of it. I was excited to be building a friendship with someone who lived down the street, whose kids played with my kid, who was in the same industry.
What I did not notice for a while was that we only talked when she needed something. If I called her about my day, my kid, a hard week, my listing, anything that was not her asking for something, the call went to voicemail. I would not hear from her for weeks.
Then one afternoon I was at her house helping her with a listing that was not even hers yet. Our kids were jumping on the trampoline. I was sitting on her lawn in the shade, my water bottle propped at a forty-five degree angle in the grass held up by my sandals, my feet tucked under my sweater. My son was yelling “momma, momma, look how high I can go.” It should have been pure summertime bliss.
Instead she was telling me that nobody had ever shown her how to do any of this real estate stuff. That she just wanted someone to hold her hand through it. That she was completely on her own.
I had shown her how to do most of it. I had watched myself show her.
And then her daughter came over to ask her something. She told her daughter to go play, she was meeting with a client right now. Her daughter knew me. Our kids had played together at my house.
Excuse me?
I was helping her prep for a potential listing. I had brought my son over so our kids could play while we worked. I was not her client. I had never been her client. But that was the word she chose.
I smiled at my kid on the trampoline. I side-eyed her comment. I did not say anything. I filed it away in the part of my brain that would eventually get around to processing it.
The part that got around to processing it was on a summer evening, in my mom’s car.
We had gone to get coffee. On the way home, we were chasing the sunset and the sound of sirens. I do not remember what I was going to say when we came around the corner near her house. I remember what came out instead.
“I really don’t like her.”
I surprised myself. I had not been thinking that, exactly. What I had been thinking, every time I saw her car or her posts or her name on my phone, was less specific. Just a bad taste. A tightening in my chest. A vague sense that something was off that I could not name.
Until I named it, in the driver’s seat, without meaning to.
I told my mom the whole story. When I pulled into the driveway I got out of the car, grabbed my stuff, and stood there for a second looking out toward the road.
“It took me far too long to realize this,” I said, “but I just figured out that if you always feel like shit after talking with someone, they are not good for you.”
My mom said, “yeah?”
Like duh. Like welcome to the party.
If I constantly feel like shit after talking with someone, they are NOT my people.
A couple of weeks later, something else happened with someone else. Different person. Different dynamic. Same lesson.
Things had been going well for me. I was happy. I was in a stretch of feeling like myself again. And then the phone started buzzing.
I was working at the law firm that morning, at my desk upstairs, deep in something for work. I could hear my son downstairs playing with the puppy, and my parents trying to defuse the chaos of a toddler and a sixty-five pound baby bear with a squeaky toy. The house was loud in a normal way.
Then my phone started buzzing.
A year ago I would have folded. I would have picked up. I would have negotiated with myself about how to make the other person feel better. I would have talked myself out of the boundary I had already drawn, because holding it felt worse than giving it up.
I did not do that this time.
I let the phone buzz. I kept working. I answered when I was ready and I said no when I meant no. The response was a wall of texts. Then another. Then some passive aggressive threats designed to see what would stick. Nothing stuck.
Anxiety in my chest, in my stomach, in my hands. Part of me wanted to fold just so it would stop. Part of me was building a very compelling case for why it would be easier to just fold. Just this once. Just to make it stop. That part of me was constructing arguments worthy of the Supreme Court. It had declarations. It had precedent. It had a whole opening statement about how giving in one time was not really giving in.
I did not fold.
I sat in the anxiety. I let it be there. I kept the boundary I had already set.
And here is what I noticed, once the storm passed and I could think clearly again: this happens every time things get good for me. Every time. When I am steady, when I am happy, when I am building something, this person finds a reason to be furious. Fights get started. Unsolicited tough conversations get scheduled. Bad moods get weaponized. The energy of my whole life gets pulled toward managing someone else’s reaction to my being okay.
It’s not a coincidence.
The pattern only works if I participate. I refused to participate.
This past month has been the first month in over a year that I have been living instead of just surviving.
Surviving is what I did for a long time. Get through the day. Get through the week. Get through the transition. Get through the fight. Get through the anxiety. Just get through.
Living looks different.
Living is noticing the two drakes and the dove who hang out on my neighbor’s roof, waiting for me to bring out the birdseed. Living is belly-laughing at something goofy with my son and feeling the laugh in my whole body. Living is realizing that everything is handleable. That everything is figureoutable. That the cliched sayings are not so horrible when I can actually relate to them.
Living is not dreading the sound of my phone vibrating.
Living is curling up with true crime and letting my brain rest.
Living is pulling my paints back out, letting the creative juices flow, and losing an hour to a color I did not mean to mix.
The flow state, it turns out, correlates a lot with living and not just surviving.
I still find post-its in weird places. One I pulled out this morning, tucked behind my cow socks from DSW that say “not amoosed,” just says don’t change the cringey parts. don’t throw away your bad art. No context. No scene. Just a reminder from past me to current me, filed in the sock drawer for safekeeping.
Some of them are profound. Some of them are barely sentences. I am keeping all of them.
There will be more post-its. There always are.
But this month, for the first time in a long time, the thoughts I am writing down are not survival notes. They are not reminders to keep going. They are not lists of what I have to get through.
They are things I noticed.
That is the difference.
Homebody & Heart 
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