I keep thinking about how often I’ve felt like I was doing life wrong.
I grew up too slow.
I grew up too fast.
Too soft.
Too focused on things that didn’t “count.”
I was the “weird” kid.
I liked going to my cousin’s house and helping her clean her room.
I loved office supplies when I was seven.
I played with Barbies until I was at least fifteen.
When I was a kid, I was the one who went back down the street on Halloween because the elderly woman looked sad when we skipped her house. I wanted to take the candy she had waited to give. I didn’t want her to feel forgotten.
I was the kid who stayed behind at summer camp to help clean up after craft time, long after everyone else ran outside.
I grew up in a house with grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, and my immediate family all under one roof. I was raised to respect everyone, not just the loudest voice in the room. It was a good home. Not perfect. Not always emotionally mature. I saw things I probably shouldn’t have, and learned things earlier than I needed to. But I was protected from a lot of things other kids weren’t. You take it for what it’s worth.
That home taught me discernment. We weren’t always good at how we reacted to things—but we knew things. Intuition ran as deep as wit, and just as quietly.
I was younger than most kids my age, but somehow wiser than their parents.
I noticed things about the room that others didn’t. When someone spoke, I would scan the faces around them. I knew who was happy, who was confused. I could tell who was sad, and who was about to melt down.
But the truth is, I was never bad at life.
I was just built for building.
Maybe my dad taught me a lot of that. He was always trying to make me think—to see the other side of things and people. He could tell I was a trusting child, and in his own quiet way, he tried to help me understand that things aren’t always what they seem. He taught me to trust that feeling when something doesn’t feel right. In his own way, he was saying, “you learned to read a room before you learned to speak in it.”
He still sits with me and talks to me about my life. I’m grateful for that. It shaped me into the kind of person I am today, someone who thinks in layers, who tries to notice what’s unseen.
That kind of noticing doesn’t disappear when you grow up.
It becomes a way of moving through the world.
I think my dad knew more than he ever said. He was aware, and in his own way, he was trying to do something different. He taught me how to pause. How to look before reacting. How to consider what was happening beneath the surface. Maybe that was his way of breaking generational patterns and surviving in the world, by teaching me how to act instead of react.
None of that fits traditional productivity.
I didn’t burn to perform.
I burned to tend wounds.
Producing, organizing, and even daydreaming- those things didn’t exhaust me. They felt natural. Like putting things back where they belonged. Like preparing space for something good to happen.
Still, there’s a quiet fear in saying that out loud.
In naming what I do without apologizing for it.
In admitting that this way of being is not a phase.
That it’s not something I need to outgrow.
There is relief in finally letting it be enough.
I don’t need to make it useful.
I don’t need to make it impressive.
I don’t need to teach from it.
I just need to witness it.
Some things only exist so we can recognize ourselves in them.
And sometimes, that’s the holiest work there is.
Noticing becomes pausing.
Pausing becomes choosing.
Choosing becomes tending.
Maybe this is how we learn to live on purpose.
