The Still Point
The Table
It has been a long but good day — walks, the park, books, coloring. Now everyone is resting and it is the perfect time to start cooking dinner. The kids are content, Jarrod is still working, and I can put on a podcast and get lost in the kitchen. I am trying out a new recipe that promises to be a kid pleaser adults will love too. It is a perfect cooking session. No interruptions, an interesting podcast that has me thinking, everything plated beautifully. Now to get everyone to the table before it gets cold.
Today, for some reason, they all come easily. They sit. They start to eat. I take my first bite. I think it is good — everything the blog promised. And then. Esme doesn’t like it. Jarrod’s is cold. Ivy’s water doesn’t have ice. Aura likes the food but it is the wrong color plate.
As hard as I try, I just can’t get it right.
The Still Point
Working towards getting it right isn’t new to me. I have carried it across many versions of myself — the teammate, the daughter, the employee, the friend, the girlfriend, the roommate. As the roles have evolved so have my reactions. I have gone from vocal and defensive, to quiet and small, to still and reflective.
The still and reflective version of me started to ask a different question.
Have you ever watched a show and got frustrated with the main character because they aren’t sticking up for themselves? You can see something plain as day and that character is just frozen. She won’t ask out the guy who likes her. She won’t tell off the boss who is clearly taking advantage of her. She won’t leave the guy who treats her like garbage. You’re sitting there yelling at the TV, or dissecting it with your friends the next day. I love the show, but I cannot take it anymore — why won’t she just leave him? Your friend nods. It’s so obvious it hurts.
But have you ever stopped to think that maybe she isn’t frozen in fear — or lacking courage — but frozen in the moment, because she is in the moment? She has to be there — that’s where her life is playing out. She is absorbing what is happening and letting it live before reacting. Is that what it actually looks like to be present? If she reacted more efficiently, more quickly, it would make for a tidier story sure. But it would be less exciting and probably not worth watching.
I feel like that a lot in my own life. Suspended in moments. Not the sweet ones you’re thinking of — the cute comment, the sleeping face you want to memorize — although I find myself there too. The moments I find myself suspended are quieter than that. The moments of not reacting to another person’s actions, words, criticism. Not because I am a coward. But because in that moment, reacting feels like the easy way out. What if the harder thing — the one nobody talks about — is to just stay in it? To let it move through you before you decide what it means?
The Quiet Noise Nobody Talks About
I wake up every morning at 4:45am feeling two things simultaneously — intense enthusiasm for my creative work and complete exhaustion, because it is 4:45am and I have three little children. I do it anyway. I wake up for a small slice of quiet. A bit of freedom.
It isn’t the loud noise that bothers me. It’s the quiet noise that hums in the background. The noise of managing four other strong personalities under one roof. As a self-diagnosed highly sensitive person, I feel everything. There is a visceral feeling that starts in my belly — a heat — that moves through my entire body when someone close to me is hurt, crying, frustrated, disappointed. For as long as I can remember I called that empathy. I thought I was absorbing their experience, feeling their emotions as my own, putting myself in their shoes.
But that was never quite right either.
It is much simpler than that. That kind of energy bothers me. Disrupts me. Makes me uncomfortable. And if it is really about my discomfort — not their pain — then empathy is the wrong word entirely.
And so what looks like a day full of compassion and caretaking is really something else altogether — an exhausting attempt to arrange the people around me into a state that feels manageable. To smooth the edges of my environment so it fits my nervous system.
I think labeling myself a people pleaser was me looking outward for the reason I feel so exhausted. The constant calibration of other people’s emotions turns out to be much more selfish than I ever admitted.
The Creative Door
The only place left to go is inward. So I do.
I sit at my computer, feverishly typing. I am in the zone.
The zone is a creative place where I am 100% myself. Where creativity oozes out of me — whether it becomes something or not doesn’t matter. It is the expression that matters. The release. It pours onto the page like paint. It feels good. Intoxicating, even.
And in the same moment, I am holding my breath. Because at any time someone could wake up. The dog could need out. I might need to get up and make the tea the exact right way. My zone could be broken before my 7 am mark.
And then it happens.
I am mid-sentence of what feels like the best sentence I have ever written — they all feel like that when at any second you could be interrupted. It feels like I can’t type fast enough to get the thoughts out of my head. My fingers are moving at lightning speed, so focused on the screen that nothing could take my gaze away.
And then I hear the whimper.
The whimper that stops my fingers. The whimper I can’t ignore. The whimper that makes me stop mid-sentence. The whimper that hurts my heart, because I know she noticed my absence in her bed.
And just like that, my creative door is shut.
Both Things True
Here I am, five in the morning, writing this. Fingers moving, thoughts flowing, a half-asleep baby warm in my arms — and all I can think is that this is exactly the way it is supposed to be.
The creativity pours out of me because life is full, life is messy, life needs a bit of sorting out. There is no creativity without the tension. No voice without the frustration of the gap between where you are and where you want to be. The whimper in the dark, the calibration, the heat in my belly, the 4:45am — all of it. She is the muse and the interruption at the same time.
In this semi-stillness I can see that I want to comfort my daughter and at the same time I want to finish my piece. Both things true at once. What I thought was selflessness and what I thought was selfishness turn out to be the same thing — and I think they are supposed to exist that way. Together. Unresolved.
That is what these frozen moments hold if you stay in them long enough to look. Long enough to realize you were never supposed to get it all right. That’s part of the show. That’s what makes it worth watching. Worth living.