Category: Mental Health

When Compassion Becomes Permission

I’ve always considered myself a reasonably understanding person. Perhaps occasionally to a fault. I can recognize insecurity beneath arrogance, fear beneath anger, and vulnerability beneath some truly spectacular displays of bad behavior. Give me enough time, and I can probably construct a fairly convincing psychological explanation for why someone behaves like an asshole.

But here’s the question I’ve been asking myself lately: At what point does understanding someone’s behavior become an excuse for continuing to tolerate it?

We tell ourselves that people are complicated. That they’re doing the best they can. That their childhood was difficult, their relationships are complicated, perhaps they never really learned how to develop a healthy sense of self, or their boss has so much on his plate that he’s just frustrated. Maybe Mercury is doing something particularly obnoxious in Scorpio.

And sometimes all of those things are true.

But explanations are not exemptions.

Understanding why someone behaves a certain way does not make the behavior acceptable. Compassion does not require unlimited accommodation. And forgiveness is not a lifetime subscription to the same injury.

When the Pattern Becomes Predictable

After enough repetitions, something interesting happens. You no longer need to wait for the next incident to recognize what’s coming. You know the sequence. You recognize the provocation, the withdrawal, the justification, and the inevitable attempt to restore things without ever addressing what went wrong.

You can practically predict the next move.

You don’t even need tarot cards to tell you what’s coming, although I certainly appreciate their occasional confirmation of what I already suspect.

At some point, the question stops being whether you understand the other person’s behavior. You understand it perfectly well. The question becomes why you continue participating.

And there’s a peculiar arrogance in repeatedly hurting someone and then expressing surprise when they finally stop responding.

Some people become so accustomed to managing relationships through ego, withdrawal, jealousy, and the occasional breadcrumb of affection that they mistake another person’s patience for permanent permission. When insecurity masquerades as indifference, or perceived rejection provokes retaliation, the resulting damage is often self-inflicted.

Yet when the familiar gesture no longer produces the familiar response, they seem genuinely bewildered.

Perhaps what they fail to recognize is that the other person has been paying attention all along.

They’ve observed the patterns, considered the motivations, and eventually learned that not every provocation requires a reaction, nor does every gesture of affection deserve renewed access.

And here’s the distinction that interests me most: Someone can become deeply attached to the reassurance of knowing you’re available without ever developing the emotional maturity necessary to sustain a healthy relationship with you.

Healthy attachment makes room for vulnerability, reciprocity, and accountability. Unhealthy attachment can become a preoccupation with reassurance, control, or the avoidance of emotional discomfort.

Of course, an unhealthy attachment style doesn’t automatically make someone manipulative. But when a person repeatedly uses withdrawal, jealousy, anger, or affection to influence another person’s behavior, we’re no longer talking simply about an attachment style. We’re talking about choices.

And choices have consequences.

The Things We Learn to Excuse

This behavior isn’t exclusive to romantic relationships. It happens in families, friendships, and workplaces, where someone else’s difficult temperament gradually becomes everyone else’s responsibility.

Consider the perpetually frustrated boss.

He has so much on his plate. He’s under tremendous pressure. He’s juggling a hundred responsibilities, and sometimes his frustration spills over onto the people around him. Everyone knows he can be difficult, but that’s just how he is.

And so people accommodate him.

They choose their words carefully, anticipate his moods, excuse his outbursts, and quietly absorb the consequences of his inability to regulate his own emotions.

Over time, what began as an occasional accommodation becomes an unspoken expectation. His frustration is understandable; everyone else’s discomfort is simply the cost of doing business.

I experienced this dynamic firsthand while managing a catering operation.

One of the young women who worked for me was someone I genuinely adored. She was sweet, hardworking, and still learning how to navigate the personalities and pressures of a demanding professional environment.

Unfortunately, one of those personalities belonged to my boss.

His anger had become something the rest of us learned to anticipate. There were warning signs. Changes in his tone. Shifts in his mood. The unmistakable sense that an ordinary conversation could suddenly become something considerably less ordinary.

We learned to recognize those signs and adjust our behavior accordingly.

Then one day, my boss asked me to address this young woman’s behavior. He wanted me to teach her how to respond to him in a way he found more acceptable.

And so I found myself explaining that when he became angry, sometimes the best thing she could do was simply say, “Yes, Glenn.”

Don’t explain.

Don’t defend yourself.

Don’t try to make him understand.

Just say yes.

And suddenly, it was as though a light bulb went off.

I remember feeling physically ill. Almost as though someone had punched me in the stomach.

I wasn’t being asked to teach my employee how to do her job better.

I was being asked to teach her how to accommodate abusive behavior.

It reminded me of a dynamic that sometimes develops in families where children experience abuse.

An older child, having learned to recognize the warning signs, tries to protect the younger children.

“Stay out of his way.”

“Don’t argue.”

“Just say yes, sir.”

“That way, you won’t get hit.”

The older child isn’t condoning the abuse. They’re trying to protect the younger ones from experiencing what they’ve already experienced themselves.

But something deeply troubling happens in that exchange.

The responsibility for preventing the next incident shifts from the person behaving abusively to the people desperately trying not to provoke them.

And there I was, standing in a professional kitchen, recognizing a version of that same dynamic.

The circumstances were different, certainly. But the underlying mechanism was painfully familiar.

I was teaching a young woman to accommodate the behavior of a man who should have been responsible for managing his own.

And it made me sick.

I’ve spent considerable time reflecting on my feelings about that experience. I’ve questioned whether my anger distorted my perspective, whether resentment influenced my interpretation, whether I was simply looking for reasons to be angry.

But eventually, I had to recognize what I was doing.

I was making excuses again.

I was extending the benefit of the doubt to someone whose behavior I’d witnessed repeatedly, while questioning the legitimacy of my own response to it.

And my experience was hardly unique. Former colleagues described similar treatment.

At some point, calling behavior what it is isn’t an act of retaliation. It’s an act of recognition.

Because there’s a difference between someone having a difficult day and someone repeatedly creating an environment in which other people must manage their moods, anticipate their anger, and modify perfectly reasonable behavior to avoid becoming its next target.

And this wasn’t the fucking Army. It wasn’t the Marines. The last time I checked, Goddess wasn’t looking for a few good men.

We were running a catering operation, for God’s sake.

I don’t regret trying to protect my employee.

But I deeply regret that the way I tried to protect her involved teaching her to tolerate treatment she never should have had to tolerate in the first place.

Perhaps the most disturbing thing about enabling is that sometimes it doesn’t feel like enabling at all.

Sometimes it feels like protecting someone.

Until you realize you’re teaching them how to survive a situation that should never have been acceptable.

Consider the alcoholic who promises to stop drinking.

And perhaps, for a while, they do.

There’s relief. Renewed hope. The possibility that this time things really will be different.

Then comes a beer.

Just one. No reason to make a fuss about it.

Eventually, it’s a bottle of wine. Then whiskey. The promises become negotiations, the negotiations become excuses, and before long, you’re right back where you started.

Except perhaps you’re not.

Because now you’re dealing with someone drinking half a bottle of whiskey and throwing you across the room.

And somehow, in the aftermath, the conversation returns to their addiction, their struggles, their shame, their promises to change.

We understand that alcoholism is a disease. We understand that relapse is a possibility and that recovery can be a complicated process.

But somewhere in our compassion for the person struggling with addiction, we risk losing sight of the person being harmed by their behavior.

The disease may help explain the drinking.

It does not excuse the violence.

And perhaps that’s one of the cruelest aspects of this particular cycle. Each promise of sobriety invites us to restore our faith in the person we remember, while each relapse asks us to reconsider how much more we’re willing to endure.

At some point, the question is no longer whether we believe someone is capable of recovery.

It’s whether we’re willing to keep sacrificing our own safety while we wait for it.

Because we can hope someone gets better without remaining in the path of what happens when they don’t.

But here’s something I’ve come to appreciate about reaching midlife: there is a certain freedom in discovering that you no longer feel obligated to make yourself smaller to accommodate someone else’s inability to manage themselves.

Perhaps it comes with experience. Perhaps it’s the accumulated wisdom of having watched the same patterns unfold in different relationships, with different people, often producing remarkably similar results.

Or perhaps there’s something to be said for a woman who has reached midlife and stopped bleeding for other people.

Literally and figuratively.

At some point, patience stops feeling like a virtue when it’s being demanded rather than appreciated. Understanding becomes exhausting when it flows in only one direction. And keeping the peace begins to look suspiciously like taking responsibility for someone else’s behavior.

The interesting part is what happens when you stop.

People who have grown accustomed to your accommodation may interpret your boundaries as defiance. The person who once praised your patience may suddenly accuse you of being difficult. Your refusal to absorb their frustration becomes, in their telling, the problem.

But perhaps you haven’t become difficult at all.

Perhaps you’ve simply stopped making it so easy for other people to be difficult.

And sometimes, after years of extending grace, choosing your words carefully, and reminding yourself that everyone is fighting battles you know nothing about, you reach the limits of your diplomatic abilities.

And you tell your boss to go fuck himself.

Literally.

Now, I’m not suggesting this is the pinnacle of professional communication. I’m fairly certain it won’t appear in any management textbook, and I wouldn’t recommend including it in your annual performance review.

But there is something revealing about the moment when a person who has spent years accommodating other people’s behavior finally loses the desire to accommodate it.

It’s not necessarily a moment of enlightenment. Sometimes it’s simply the moment you realize that understanding someone has cost you far more than they’ve ever been willing to understand about you.

The Slow Erosion of Affection

There’s another consequence of remaining in unhealthy relationships that I don’t think we discuss nearly enough.

Eventually, the relationship begins to change you.

You become suspicious where you were once trusting, defensive where you were once open, and impatient where you once offered seemingly limitless understanding.

Even when you aren’t responsible for creating the dysfunction, prolonged exposure to it can influence how you think, feel, and behave.

And that’s worth examining honestly.

Because it isn’t always the case that one person is entirely toxic while the other remains some beautifully enlightened creature, untouched by the experience. We can develop our own unhealthy responses. We can become reactive, resentful, hypervigilant, or unnecessarily guarded.

We may even begin behaving in ways we once criticized in someone else.

Not because we’ve become the same person, but because we’ve spent so much time adapting to the conditions they helped create.

And perhaps most painfully, repeated injury can gradually destroy the very affection that made us willing to tolerate so much in the first place.

I think of it like a vase.

The first time someone knocks it off the table, it breaks into a few large pieces. You gather them carefully, find some glue, and put it back together.

It isn’t perfect. There are visible hairline fractures, but it still resembles the vase you loved. You place it back on the table, hopeful that it will remain intact.

Then it gets knocked over again.

This time, there are more pieces. Some are smaller. The fractures don’t align quite as neatly. You spend more time trying to repair it, but something about its shape has changed.

It still stands, although perhaps not quite as securely.

And then it happens again.

Eventually, the pieces become too small, the fractures too numerous, and the prospect of another repair too exhausting. There isn’t enough left to reconstruct what once existed.

So you get the dustpan, sweep up what’s left, and throw it away.

Not because you never loved the vase.

Not because you didn’t try to save it.

But because you finally understood that your willingness to repair something could not compensate for someone else’s willingness to keep breaking it.

And here’s the particularly absurd part.

The person who repeatedly knocked the vase off the table may still expect you to keep repairing it.

They may even become angry when you refuse.

Suddenly, your unwillingness to make another repair becomes the problem. The years of damage disappear from the conversation, replaced by accusations that you’ve changed, become cold, or stopped caring.

Funny how the person who finally puts down the glue is so often accused of breaking the vase.

Compassion Is Not Compliance

I’ve been thinking quite a bit about the difference between compassion and accommodation.

In Buddhist philosophy, compassion involves recognizing suffering and wishing for its alleviation. But compassion is not the same as surrendering our judgment, abandoning our boundaries, or accepting repeated harm.

We can acknowledge someone’s suffering without agreeing to suffer alongside them indefinitely.

And perhaps that is where our understanding of the self becomes particularly important.

When someone hasn’t developed a healthy sense of self, relationships can become less about mutual connection and more about obtaining reassurance, protecting the ego, or avoiding uncomfortable truths about themselves. Their sense of worth may depend so heavily on how others respond that even a perceived rejection feels like a personal attack.

Rather than examining the insecurity beneath that reaction, they may withdraw, retaliate, or attempt to regain control of the situation. And when those behaviors damage the relationship, they may struggle to recognize their own participation in its deterioration.

But another person’s affection cannot substitute for the internal work of developing self-worth.

Nor can our patience, understanding, or willingness to forgive do that work for them.

The difficulty is that we sometimes mistake intensity for intimacy, familiarity for safety, and repeated reconciliation for evidence that a relationship is somehow meant to endure.

We become attached not only to the person, but to the possibility that this time things will be different.

When Understanding Becomes Avoidance

There’s an uncomfortable question beneath all of this, and I don’t think we can examine these relationships honestly without asking it.

When does our desire to be understanding become our reluctance to accept what we already understand?

Because sometimes we know.

We recognize the pattern. We anticipate the next incident. We understand the emotional mechanisms, the defensive responses, and the predictable attempts to restore the relationship without addressing the underlying problem.

We can explain the entire cycle with remarkable accuracy.

And yet we continue participating.

Perhaps because we love the person. Perhaps because we feel responsible for them. Perhaps because leaving would require us to confront losses we’re not yet prepared to accept.

Or perhaps because understanding the problem feels more manageable than making a decision about it.

There’s a difference between reflection and rumination. Reflection helps us develop insight that informs our choices. Rumination keeps us returning to the same questions without necessarily moving toward resolution.

And I suspect that sometimes our endless attempts to understand another person’s behavior become another way of postponing our own decisions.

After all, if we’re still trying to figure out why someone behaves this way, perhaps we don’t yet have to decide what we’re going to do about it.

But understanding doesn’t always require another explanation.

Sometimes the pattern itself is the information.

And sometimes the healthiest response is simply to stop participating.

Not to punish the other person. Not to provoke a reaction or demonstrate that we can win the game by refusing to play.

But because we no longer want to live inside the game at all.

The Hand We Finally Withdraw

Perhaps the most difficult part of letting go is accepting that we cannot make another person recognize the consequences of their choices.

We cannot force insight, manufacture remorse, or convince someone to value a relationship in the way we believe it deserves to be valued.

We can communicate. We can offer understanding. We can extend forgiveness. We can even give someone another opportunity to behave differently.

But we cannot do the changing for them.

And there’s a world of difference between setting a boundary and attempting to control someone else’s response to it.

One is an expression of personal agency. The other can become yet another attempt to manage the relationship through expectations and emotional consequences.

The goal isn’t to make someone regret losing access to us.

The goal is to recognize when continued access comes at the expense of our own well-being.

I can understand why you are the way you are without accepting that this is the way you are allowed to treat me.

I can recognize your wounds without accepting responsibility for healing them.

I can care about you without continuing to participate in a relationship that repeatedly harms me.

And perhaps most importantly, I can acknowledge my own participation in a dysfunctional pattern without assuming responsibility for another person’s behavior.

That’s not indifference.

That’s discernment.

For years, I believed that understanding people was one of my greatest strengths. I still believe it is. But I’m beginning to appreciate that understanding has limits—not necessarily limits to our compassion, but limits to what compassion should require us to endure.

Maybe growing older has something to do with it. Maybe it’s experience, exhaustion, wisdom, or some glorious combination of all three.

Or maybe there simply comes a point when you’ve repaired the same vase so many times that you finally recognize the absurdity of keeping it on the same precarious table.

Whatever the explanation, I’ve come to believe that there is a quiet kind of freedom in no longer needing someone else to understand why you’ve chosen to walk away.

You don’t need their agreement.

You don’t need their permission.

And you certainly don’t need one more demonstration of a pattern you’ve already witnessed a hundred times.

Sometimes the greatest change in a relationship occurs not when one person finally behaves differently, but when the other stops participating in what has never changed.

And perhaps that’s the expiration date of understanding.

Not the moment we stop having compassion for someone.

The moment we finally understand that compassion for others must also include compassion for ourselves.

Last week,  I was let go from my job.

I was numb.

And then I cried for four or five hours.

Not necessarily because I wasn’t going to be the Catering Manager anymore. Not because I couldn’t imagine my life without the job. The truth is, I had written my resignation letter on June 6 and held onto it for nearly three months.

I think I cried because what happened didn’t align with what I was told had happened.

And that mattered to me.

It still does.

I am deeply attuned to timing—to endings and beginnings, to the strange ways life tells us when something has run its course. I’ve learned to pay attention when something inside me starts whispering that a season is changing.

Sometimes I listen.

Sometimes, apparently, I need a little assistance.

Maybe that’s part of what happened here.

I knew in June that something wasn’t right. I knew it strongly enough to sit down and write a resignation letter.

But I didn’t send it.

I stayed.

I stayed because the problem was never Gateway.

The problem was Goddess.

I loved Gateway. I loved the work, the people, the pace, the production, the insanity of it. I loved walking into a building where three studios might be operating simultaneously and nearly 900 plates could move through the dining room in a day. I loved solving problems. I loved the relationships I built there. I loved discovering that I could walk into that kind of environment and not only survive it, but lead inside it.

So I ignored the letter sitting there.

Maybe that’s another thing I’ve learned.

Sometimes you know when it’s time to leave long before you’re willing to go.

You feel it. You write the letter. You put the truth on paper.

And then you stay.

You stay because there are still people you love. Because there are things you’re learning. Because there are pieces of the experience you’re not ready to surrender. You stay because you keep hoping something will change. Because maybe if you try harder, communicate better, give a little more, forgive one more thing, it will finally become what you keep believing it could be.

But there comes a point when staying in something that continually hurts you begins to hurt you more than leaving ever could.

And I believe life has a way of dealing with that.

Call it the universe. Call it God. Call it circumstance. Call it whatever you want.

I believe there are times when we know we’re supposed to leave something and refuse to do it ourselves, so eventually the decision gets made for us.

And sometimes it isn’t gentle.

Sometimes the door doesn’t quietly open and invite you to walk through it.

Sometimes it slams behind you.

Sometimes the ending is painful and humiliating and final precisely because you kept finding reasons to stay through every quieter opportunity you had to leave.

Maybe that’s what happened to me.

I had already written the resignation letter.

I already knew.

And I stayed anyway.

Maybe the universe didn’t take something away from me.

Maybe it finally removed me from something I couldn’t bring myself to leave.

That doesn’t make the way it happened hurt less.

But it changes what I think the pain means.

Maybe I wasn’t wrong to stay as long as I did. Had I left on June 6, I would have missed people and experiences I wouldn’t trade now simply because I dislike the way the story eventually ended.

Maybe I needed to stay long enough to get what I came there to learn.

But maybe I also needed to learn that once the lesson is over, staying doesn’t earn you extra credit.

Sometimes it just makes the exit harder.

And when I wouldn’t close the door myself, it closed for me.

Not gracefully.

Certainly not the way I would have chosen.

But completely.

And maybe that’s the lesson underneath all the others:

When something continually breaks you, leaving isn’t failure. Sometimes leaving is the boundary you should have drawn long before the universe drew it for you.

So after four or five hours of crying, I eventually found myself asking a different question.

Not Why did this happen to me?

But:

What was I supposed to learn from it?

And maybe the lesson wasn’t simply that shit rolls downhill.

Maybe Gateway was never just about Gateway.

There are places we enter believing we’re there to do a job, and only later realize we were there to learn something about ourselves.

Gateway became a classroom in competence, leadership, power, loyalty, communication, boundaries—and ultimately, letting go.

I learned the work there.

Not theoretically.

I learned it by doing it.

I learned how to walk into chaos and start organizing it. I learned how to make decisions when there wasn’t time to deliberate endlessly. I learned how to solve problems before anyone had time to ask whether they could be solved. I learned how to take care of people while still getting the job done.

And perhaps most importantly, I learned that I was good at it.

Sometimes, if you’re extraordinarily fortunate, the work also puts a teacher in your path.

That summer, mine was Colette VanLoon.

Colette doesn’t work for Goddess.

She works for Paul McCartney.

She has spent four decades in the entertainment industry and has been Paul’s backstage coordinator for eighteen years. In my world, that’s about as close to rock ‘n’ roll royalty as it gets.

She hadn’t planned on spending her summer at Gateway. She came in to help Goddess because her sister, Kim, works there.

And somehow, through that strange intersection of timing and circumstance, I got six weeks working beside her.

Six weeks of mentorship from someone with forty years of experience doing this work at the highest level.

You cannot learn that from a book.

You cannot read your way into forty years of knowing what happens backstage when the stakes are high. There is no textbook for the instinct that comes from decades of walking into rooms, reading them correctly and knowing what needs to happen next.

I got to watch it.

I got to ask questions.

I got to learn from it.

And Colette gave me something beyond the mechanics of the work.

She had the benefit of coming into the environment with decades of experience behind her and seeing it through a lens I simply didn’t have yet. Her perspective gave context to things I had already been noticing and feeling for myself.

She didn’t create my concerns.

Remember, the resignation letter was already sitting there.

But sometimes the most important thing a mentor gives you isn’t an answer.

It’s a lens.

Colette helped me trust what I was already seeing.

The illusion was no more.

There is something almost poetic about the fact that one of the greatest gifts Goddess gave me was bringing Colette VanLoon into my life.

For six weeks, I got an education I could never have bought.

And I’ll carry that one with me.

I also learned something about the kind of leader I never want to become.

I experienced a style of management that, from my perspective, relied heavily on fear and intimidation.

The problem with intimidation is that it only works when the person on the receiving end is willing to be intimidated.

I am not intimidated.

I’m not easily frightened by titles, authority, raised voices, posturing or someone else’s need to establish dominance. Unless you’re a serial killer holding me captive in your house of horrors, I’m probably not going to be afraid of you.

But underneath the joke is something I believe deeply:

Intimidation is not leadership.

There is a difference between having authority and needing someone else to feel small in order to prove you have it. There is a difference between commanding respect and demanding submission.

Fear can produce compliance.

Intimidation can produce silence.

Neither one produces trust.

And this summer taught me something else about what happens when you begin using your voice.

You can express yourself calmly. You can take accountability for your own part. You can say, Here’s what I could have done differently, and here’s what I need to be different going forward.

People respond to that in very different ways.

Some people hear you.

They may not agree with everything you say, but they recognize that you’re speaking in good faith. Sometimes they even appreciate it. They adjust their behavior. The relationship gets better because honesty has created room for mutual respect.

And then there are people who double down.

Your calmness doesn’t calm them. Your accountability isn’t met with accountability of their own. Your boundary isn’t received as information about how to work with you.

It’s experienced as a challenge.

That taught me something important:

You can communicate a boundary respectfully. You cannot control whether someone receives it respectfully.

And another person’s reaction to your boundary doesn’t automatically mean the boundary was wrong.

Sometimes healthy communication improves a relationship.

Sometimes it reveals one.

There was another lesson in all of this about loyalty.

I originally hired a staff of fifteen.

By the end, I was the last one standing.

I don’t say that as some declaration of martyrdom. Hospitality has turnover. People leave. Circumstances change. Seasons are hard.

But one particular experience stayed with me.

An employee walked out in the middle of a shift. Her departure left six uncovered shifts behind, and the responsibility for figuring out how to staff them landed with me.

And we did it.

My staff rallied in a way I will never forget.

People canceled doctor’s appointments. They came in on scheduled days off. They rearranged their lives. Some worked sixteen-hour days. I covered shifts myself.

Together, we filled every hole and kept things moving.

I was incredibly proud of them.

Later, the employee who had walked out was rehired because she was needed to work dressing rooms.

There was no conversation with the people who had absorbed the consequences of her leaving. There was no acknowledgment of what they had sacrificed to keep things running.

Not even a simple thank you.

Two of my employees quit after she was brought back.

That stayed with me.

Not because I believe every management decision requires consensus. It doesn’t. Leadership sometimes means making decisions people won’t like.

But leadership also means understanding that decisions communicate something.

My staff didn’t need a parade.

They needed to know that what they had done mattered.

They needed to be seen.

Never ask people for extraordinary loyalty and then treat that loyalty as ordinary.

People remember whether you noticed.

They remember whether you thanked them.

They remember whether you stood up for them after they stood up for you.

If my people show up for me, I will show up for them.

If they carry something heavy, I will notice.

If they give more than the job requires, I will never behave as though I was simply entitled to it.

And when they save my ass?

I’ll say thank you.

Every single fucking time.

And somewhere in all of that, I had to acknowledge something about my own loyalty, too.

I gave a lot to this job.

I missed vacation. I came in on my days off. I showed up with thirty minutes’ notice when I was needed. I was often the last person there at the end of the day.

I stayed when staying cost me something.

And I don’t believe any of that entitled me to special treatment. I understood the job I had accepted. I understood that leadership sometimes means being the person who shows up when nobody else can.

But there is a difference between expecting someone to do their job and treating their willingness to continually go beyond it as though it costs them nothing.

Sometimes all I needed was:

Thanks for coming in. I know this was your day off.

Or:

Thanks for staying. I know you had somewhere else to be.

Hell, once it could have been:

I know you had tickets to see Brandi Carlile at Madison Square Garden. I know what you gave up to be here. Thank you.

That’s it.

Not a bonus. Not an award. Not a parade.

Just recognition that there was a human being on the other side of the job description.

Because people will do extraordinary things for work they care about and people they care about.

But extraordinary effort should never become so expected that nobody remembers to say thank you.

That experience changed the way I think about leadership, too.

Never become so accustomed to someone’s dedication that you stop recognizing it as a choice.

Because God, did I learn something about carrying things this summer.

Responsibility. Expectations. Other people’s problems. The needs of my staff. The demands of production. The things that needed to happen because somebody had to make them happen.

There is pride in knowing you can carry a tremendous amount.

There is wisdom in knowing when to put it down.

Being capable of carrying something does not mean it was ever yours to carry.

And maybe this is where the lesson reaches beyond work.

I’m tired of giving and giving and giving and getting almost nothing back.

I’m tired of being the person who stays longer, tries harder, forgives more, carries more and keeps believing that if I just show up one more time, give one more chance or prove myself one more way, eventually someone will understand what I’m worth.

I’m tired of people recognizing my value only after I’m gone.

And maybe most of all, I’m tired of staying in places I already know are toxic because some part of me still believes I can love them into becoming something different.

Or that if I work hard enough, give enough or become indispensable enough, I can somehow earn the treatment I should never have had to earn in the first place.

That’s a hard thing to admit.

Because there is something noble about loyalty.

There is something beautiful about perseverance.

There is something admirable about being the person who doesn’t give up easily.

Until there isn’t.

Sometimes staying isn’t loyalty.

Sometimes it’s abandoning yourself in order to prove your worth to people who have already demonstrated that they don’t know what to do with it.

And I don’t want to do that anymore.

I don’t want to keep auditioning for a place in rooms where I’ve already proven I belong.

I don’t want my absence to be the thing that finally makes someone understand what my presence was worth.

I don’t want to keep pouring myself into people, relationships, jobs or situations that require me to become depleted before I finally give myself permission to leave.

Maybe that’s the fence.

Not a wall around my heart.

Not becoming cynical. Not withholding love. Not keeping score every time I do something for another human being.

Just finally understanding that reciprocity matters.

That being generous doesn’t require being endlessly available.

That compassion doesn’t require self-abandonment.

That loyalty doesn’t mean staying indefinitely.

And that knowing my worth means I have to stop repeatedly placing it in the hands of people who require me to prove it.

I don’t need to give less.

I need to become more discerning about where I give.

Because I don’t want to become someone who loves less deeply because I’ve been hurt.

I want to become someone who finally understands that loving deeply includes me, too.

This was also the first time in my life I’ve ever been let go from a position.

That was new.

But if I’m being truthful, I wasn’t entirely surprised.

For some time, I had felt the temperature changing.

I felt increasing pressure after I began pushing back—after I started questioning decisions, challenging things I believed needed to be challenged, and speaking up when I found myself dealing with the consequences of decisions I hadn’t made.

There were times when I felt I was cleaning up messes I hadn’t created.

Eventually, I stopped doing that quietly.

I pushed back.

I asked questions.

I challenged authority when I believed authority needed to be challenged.

And I understood that doing so might have consequences.

What I wasn’t prepared for was what happened when I was let go.

I have always understood that people make decisions I may not agree with. Businesses make decisions. Managers make decisions. Sometimes those decisions mean you lose your job. I can accept that.

What I had a much harder time accepting was being given an explanation that I did not believe was true.

Maybe that sounds naïve, but I genuinely never believed someone would look me in the eye at one of the most vulnerable moments of my life and tell me something untrue simply because saying it made the situation easier for them—or because it would make the ending hurt more for me.

And it did hurt.

Not because I believed what was said.

Because I couldn’t understand why it needed to be said at all.

Being fired was enough.

There was no reason to make me question my value on the way out the door.

There is a difference between being difficult and being unwilling to make someone else’s difficulty invisible.

I don’t know what role my willingness to push back ultimately played in the decision to let me go.

But I do know this:

I can live with losing a job because I spoke up.

I would have had a much harder time living with myself if I had learned to stay quiet.

That’s one reason an inquiry is underway, and I’m willing to let the facts establish what happened rather than pretend I know every conversation that occurred behind closed doors.

But I know my own experience.

I know when I began feeling the pressure.

I know when the dynamic changed.

And I would rather live with the consequences of having spoken up than keep a position by becoming someone who doesn’t.

I can learn diplomacy.

I can learn when to choose my battles.

I can even learn that sometimes being right isn’t the same thing as being effective.

But I will never learn to confuse silence with professionalism.

There is still an inquiry underway into what happened at the end, and I intend to see it through.

Not because I want my job back.

I don’t.

What I was subsequently told had happened does not align with what I experienced.

There is a discrepancy there, and I intend to understand it.

If the record is wrong, I intend to correct it.

Because this isn’t about winning.

It’s about integrity.

Mine.

There are things I can walk away from.

A job is one of them.

A title.

A paycheck.

An organization.

Even a place I genuinely loved working.

But my integrity, my work ethic and my heart are different.

Those are mine.

And if you call those things into question, I will fight you to the end of the fucking earth for them.

This isn’t a fight to get something back.

It’s a fight to set the record straight.

Sometimes boundaries aren’t about walking away quietly.

Sometimes integrity requires you to stand exactly where you are and say:

No. That is not an accurate account of what happened, and I will not allow someone else’s version of events to become the unquestioned record simply because it came from higher up the organizational chart.

I can hold compassion for the people involved and still demand accountability.

Those things aren’t contradictions.

And there is one fence in particular I know now:

You may take my position. You do not get to take my character with it.

I’ve been through the fucking thing now.

I know where the sharp edges are.

That’s not bitterness.

That’s experience.

There is a kind of compassion that exists before you’ve been tested, and another kind that exists afterward.

The first believes that caring deeply will somehow be enough.

The second understands that caring deeply without boundaries can get you chewed alive.

Compassion learns where the fence goes.

Maybe that’s the real lesson.

You can learn competence, authority and leadership without surrendering your heart and compassion.

You can become stronger without becoming harder.

You can understand hierarchy without worshipping it.

You can recognize politics without becoming political.

You can learn how power works without allowing power to become the thing that defines you.

You can forgive without volunteering for the same lesson twice.

And you can love something while acknowledging that something within it wasn’t right.

I don’t want to leave this experience carrying resentment.

I’ve carried enough.

Something doesn’t have to end well for it to have been worth something.

I can be deeply disappointed by how something ended without rewriting everything that came before it.

Both things can be true.

I can wish the ending had been different.

And I can remain profoundly grateful that I was there.

Because I still love Gateway.

I love the people there, and I will miss some of them deeply.

I also know that some of those relationships won’t end simply because my employment did. There are people I expect to stay in contact with, friendships I hope to carry long after this summer becomes a story about something that happened once.

Because those people were there.

They saw me.

They watched me work.

They saw my dedication, my compassion and my leadership. They saw the long days, the problems solved and the people cared for. They saw who I was when things were going beautifully and, perhaps more importantly, who I was when they weren’t.

So I’m not worried about what the people who actually worked beside me know about my character.

I know what I brought into that building.

And I know there are people inside it who know, too.

That’s one of the reasons I refuse to let the way this ended rewrite the summer that came before it.

I can be angry about the ending and still love the place.

I can challenge what happened and still be grateful for what happened there.

I can leave without pretending I never belonged.

A job can end without every relationship inside it ending with it.

And some of the people I met at Gateway are people I very much hope to carry with me.

I’ve done a lot of things in my life.

I’ve had the extraordinary privilege of being able to do almost everything I’ve ever really wanted to do, and I don’t take that for granted. I’ve reinvented myself more than once. I’ve walked into rooms where I didn’t know exactly what I was doing and figured it out.

And I leave this summer feeling as though I somehow accumulated ten years of experience in a single season.

Some of it was exhilarating.

Some of it was exhausting.

Some of it was beautiful.

Some of it hurt like hell.

I’ll take all of it.

I’ll take the lesson and move on.

I was offered a position as a tour caterer this fall.

It was an incredible opportunity, and I was genuinely honored to be asked.

But even as the offer was being made, somewhere in the back of my mind I already knew I wasn’t going to take it.

Touring would mean being gone for a month at a time, sometimes longer.

And I knew I couldn’t do that.

My children still need me.

Maybe they don’t need me in all the ways they did when they were little. That’s the strange evolution of motherhood. The job changes constantly, but it doesn’t simply disappear because your children get older.

At the end of the day, before the career, before the adventure, before the money and before whatever impressive thing I might be able to put on a résumé:

I take care of my people.

That’s who I am.

I spent twenty years as a stay-at-home mother.

I wouldn’t trade those years.

But now I want something that belongs to me, too.

My independence and autonomy are deeply important to me.

I want my own work.

My own money.

My own path.

My own name on something I built.

I don’t have to choose between being a mother and being ambitious.

I have to decide what kind of ambition fits the life I actually want.

And then my daughter reminded me what that life looks like.

When I told Avery what had happened at Gateway, her response caught me completely off guard.

“Oh, thank God.”

I laughed.

But I don’t think I fully understood until that moment how much my being gone had affected her.

I had spent the summer measuring the cost in sixteen-hour days, exhaustion, staffing problems and everything else that comes with trying to keep a complicated operation moving.

I hadn’t stopped to consider that someone else had been keeping track of those hours, too.

My daughter.

That night, Avery curled up next to me on the couch.

She gave me back rubs.

We snuggled together and watched a movie.

Nothing remarkable happened.

A

And somehow, after the summer I’d just had, it felt remarkable.

There were no radios going off.

No staffing problems to solve.

Nobody needed me in another studio.

Nobody was asking me to carry one more thing.

My daughter just wanted her mom.

And her mom was home.

I couldn’t have asked for a better Band-Aid.

But there was something else in that moment, too.

I want to be the kind of mother—and the kind of woman—who can look her daughter in the eyes and know that I lived in a way I would be proud to see her live someday.

I want her to know that being honorable still matters.

That honesty matters.

That integrity matters.

That sometimes doing what you believe is right will cost you something.

And that the cost doesn’t make it wrong.

If my daughter ever finds herself in a room where staying quiet would be easier, I want her to have seen a woman who was willing to speak.

If she ever has to choose between protecting her position and protecting her integrity, I hope she remembers which one her mother chose.

There will be other opportunities.

Other kitchens.

Other projects.

Other doors I haven’t even imagined yet.

But there will never be another season of my children’s lives exactly like this one.

My career can wait for another opportunity. Their lives won’t wait for me to come home.

And perhaps there is another reason I’m supposed to be home this fall.

I finished my novel just before I started working at Gateway.

Then Gateway happened.

For the next several months, the book waited.

Now I think it deserves what I couldn’t give it this summer.

My time.

My editor loves it.

She believes it could do well.

I guess we’re going to find out.

Because of all the things I’ve been fortunate enough to do in my life, at the end of the day, I think my heart has always belonged to writing.

Because writing has always been more than something I love to do.

It’s how I understand things.

When something happens that I can’t quite make sense of, I write my way through it. I put the pieces on the page and move them around until I can see the shape of what happened—and, more importantly, what it meant to me.

Writing gives me distance without requiring me to disconnect.

It lets me feel something completely and still step far enough outside of it to ask better questions.

In fact, that’s what I’ve been doing here.

Last week, I cried for hours.

Today, I wrote.

And somewhere between the first sentence and this one, the story changed.

I didn’t get my job back.

I didn’t get all the answers.

Nothing about yesterday became untrue.

I just gained perspective.

Maybe that’s what writing has always done for me.

It doesn’t change what happened.

It changes the distance from which I can see it.

And sometimes that’s enough to finally understand where the fence goes.

So this fall, I’m going to write.

I’m going to send the queries.

I’ll take the rejections if they come.

And I’ll keep sending them anyway.

I’ll give this book its chance.

And I’ll give myself mine.

Gateway taught me that I can do hard things.

Goddess taught me that being capable of carrying something doesn’t mean it was ever mine to carry.

Colette taught me to pay attention.

My staff taught me what loyalty looks like.

My children reminded me where home is.

And somewhere in all of it, I learned what kind of leader I want to be—and what kind I never want to become.

Tell the truth.

Put down the weight.

Rest.

Take the lesson with you.

I’ve been through the fucking thing now.

I know where the sharp edges are.

I know what isn’t mine to carry.

I know where the fence goes.

For twenty years, I gave my time to raising the people I love most.

Now I’m ready for some time that belongs to me, too.

Not instead of them.

Alongside them.

And I know exactly what I want to do with it.

I want to write.