Yesterday, a name I hadn’t thought about in years — someone from before, pre-kid, pre-partner, all the way back to a teenage quarrel I’d genuinely forgotten I was still carrying — showed up under “people you may know” while I was scrolling on my browser, and it fired up nerve endings I thought had been severed decades ago.
I have rules around social media — the app isn’t on my phone, hasn’t been for a while now, and there’s a version of what I post and what I don’t that I’ve built pretty deliberately over the last few years. Lately I’ve been pushing on that a little, giving a little more than I used to, testing what feels okay to let out into that space. Somewhere subconsciously, some part of me must have already been holding all of that when that name showed up next to a little plus sign.
And it sent me into a full spiral. Even typing this out right now I can feel it again, welling up in my throat, my eyes going hot. Heart rate up, stomach doing the butterfly thing, throat tightening, actual tears. Over a name and a thumbnail photo.
What it felt like, more than anything, was exposure... like this beautiful cocoon of a life I’ve built here in Philly had been poked at from the outside. Not exposure to them, really — more like my younger self and that whole old identity suddenly realized my current self is reachable, and started reacting, not with one clean feeling but with a full cacophony, a bunch of internal parts all talking at once, loudly, with none of the clarity I usually have access to.
Here’s the thing about that jolt — the heart rate, the throat, the am I safe. It’s a part of me that learned, a long time ago, to watch for exactly this kind of threat, and she’s still doing her job, even though the job doesn’t really exist anymore. She’s not wrong to be alert. She’s just alert about something that stopped being dangerous years before she got the memo.
So I sat in it. Not because sitting in it makes it resolve faster — it doesn’t, really — but because I’ve learned that if I shove a reaction like this back down, it doesn’t go away, it just comes back sideways, later, in some other shape.
And once the noise settled enough to actually hear anything, I realized, to my surprise, that there wasn’t actually anything fragile in there anymore. The part of me that used to feel like it needed protecting, like there was something soft inside that could leak out and undo what I’d built if the wrong person saw it — that part’s not really accurate anymore. What’s actually in there now is firm, strong, solid all the way through. The shell could crack wide open and there’s nothing left to spill.
Which is a strange thing to realize about yourself, 41 years old, sitting at a laptop, because of a plus sign next to someone’s name.
If I put my coach hat on for a second — the lens I use with any client mid-transition — here’s what I’d say happened: the event itself was tiny. A name. A plus sign. Barely anything. But the reaction wasn’t about the event, it was about what got stirred up after it — an old part of me, still on alert, reacting to a perceived threat that had nothing to do with what was actually in front of me. And that’s usually how it goes with transitions. Everyone fixates on the event — the birth, the move, the diagnosis, the layoff — when the real work is almost never in the event itself. It’s everything after. The birth is one day; parenting the kid who comes out of it is the next eighteen years. The event is the easy part to point to. The aftermath is where you actually live.
(This is a model I use a lot in my coaching work — transitions have three layers, and almost all the friction lives in the two layers surrounding the event. Here’s the deeper breakdown if you want to go further with it.)
That’s where I landed by the time I closed the laptop yesterday. Yesterday was about sitting in the discomfort of the spiral long enough to gain clarity. Today is about what I actually do with having seen it.
I don’t think the answer is a boundary change, or a new rule, or deciding to lock something down that used to feel open. The file already updated itself, a little, just by me sitting with it instead of slamming the laptop shut. That’s most of what this kind of work actually is — not fixing anything in the moment, just letting the part of you that got loud be heard once, clearly, so it doesn’t have to shout the next time.
So today I’m not doing anything differently. Same rules, same boundary, same curated cocoon of a life. Just a little more awareness of who’s actually inside it with me — including the versions of myself I thought I’d already left behind.