The People Who Show Up
The dichotomy of discomfort.
I've been thinking a lot about disappointment lately.
Not the catastrophic, life-altering kind. The quieter variety. The kind that settles somewhere beneath your ribs and makes itself comfortable before you've even decided whether it deserves to be there.
The kind that comes from people you love.
I've always believed that most things in life exist somewhere between wonderful and terrible. Very few experiences are entirely one or the other. They're messy combinations of joy and grief, excitement and apprehension, gratitude and resentment.
Sometimes all four show up to the same fucking party.
And sometimes, if you're lucky, you learn something about yourself in the process.
A few years ago, I was feeling particularly aimless.
Unhappy and unfulfilled. Like an outdated piece of farming equipment sitting in the back of a barn. Perfectly functional, perhaps, but no longer particularly useful.
I was existing.
Doing what needed to be done.
But somewhere along the way, I'd stopped feeling like I was doing much of anything that belonged entirely to me.
Then my husband and I decided to move our family from Massachusetts to North Carolina.
Again.
We'd made the same move roughly a decade earlier, spending six wonderful years in North Carolina before returning north to be closer to family.
This time, though, we were different people.
Older. More experienced. Raising children who were growing into entirely new versions of themselves.
And I was different, too.
The woman who had loved North Carolina ten years earlier was not the same woman returning to it.
But apparently, both versions of me have excellent taste in places to live.
Because I still really fucking love it here.
I miss the ocean.
God, I miss the ocean.
There's something about the endlessness of the water that has always made me feel both insignificant and entirely at peace.
But North Carolina offers its own kind of magic.
Wildlife everywhere. Hiking trails that disappear beneath canopies of trees. Farm stands overflowing with produce. Long stretches of green and a pace of life that seems to encourage you to actually notice the world you're moving through.
And this move?
It gave us something I hadn't realized we'd been missing.
Room.
Room to breathe.
Room to grow.
Room to become a family without the constant background noise of everyone else's expectations.
We're happy here.
Not the carefully curated, everything-is-perfect kind of happy.
Real happy.
Our children are thriving. Our dogs are delighted. My husband and I have built a marriage that feels sturdier and more connected than it ever has.
After all these years together, we're somehow still discovering new ways to love one another.
Which is pretty fucking remarkable.
And me?
I feel free.
Free from the exhausting effort of trying to be whatever version of myself I imagined other people wanted.
Free from the subtle obligations that accumulate when you've spent your entire life surrounded by the same people.
Free from the expectation that being available means you should always be available.
Interestingly, the distance has also changed the way I experience family.
When we visit now, the time feels intentional.
We're guests rather than fixtures.
People make plans. We sit together. We catch up. We pay attention.
There's something lovely about being welcomed instead of simply being expected.
And yet, I've recently discovered that distance can reveal something else.
Sometimes the people who have known you the longest aren't the people who know how to celebrate who you're becoming.
That's a difficult sentence to write.
An even more difficult one to feel.
Because here's the thing.
I wrote a fucking novel.
After years of feeling directionless, after wondering what I might do that belonged to me, I sat down and created an entire world.
Characters. Conversations. Secrets. Murder. Complicated relationships. Human behavior in all its fascinating, occasionally horrifying glory.
I wrote it.
I revised it.
I questioned it.
I nearly drove myself insane over it.
And then I published it.
For me, this was enormous.
Not because I expected fame or fortune, but because I'd finally followed something I loved all the way to the finish line.
I'd accomplished something that required an extraordinary amount of patience, discipline, vulnerability, and perseverance.
Something that was mine.
Throughout the process, I kept my parents and four siblings informed.
I shared my excitement, talked about my progress, and occasionally offered little glimpses of the story.
They knew what I was working toward.
They knew when the book was coming out.
And then release day arrived.
And from them?
Nothing.
Not a phone call.
Not a text.
Not a simple Congratulations, you did it.
Radio silence.
Now, I understand that people have lives.
Busy, complicated, exhausting lives.
There are children to raise, newborns to care for, houses to settle into, careers to manage, and entire countries separating some of us.
I know that.
I understand it.
And I don't expect anyone to rearrange their existence around my accomplishments.
But I think there's a difference between expecting someone to make your day about them and hoping they'll take ten seconds to acknowledge that something important has happened to you.
At 3:26 that afternoon, I called my mother.
She answered normally.
No excitement. No mention of the book.
She'd forgotten.
And because I am apparently incapable of gracefully navigating an emotionally uncomfortable moment, I blurted out, "Today's the day my book came out."
Her response was a rather subdued, "Yippee."
That was it.
One word.
A word that, under different circumstances, might have been perfectly lovely.
But in that moment, it landed with all the enthusiasm of someone discovering the grocery store had restocked their preferred brand of paper towels.
I ended the call shortly afterward.
And I sulked.
Oh, did I fucking sulk.
Because disappointment is an interesting emotion.
It doesn't always arrive alone.
Sometimes it brings embarrassment.
Sometimes resentment.
Sometimes a deeply uncomfortable awareness that you cared more about something than the people you hoped would care alongside you.
And sometimes it makes you question whether you were foolish to expect anything in the first place.
I wasn't looking for a parade.
I didn't need flowers or gifts or a dramatic declaration of familial pride.
I just wanted to feel remembered.
And for a little while, I didn't.
But here's where this story becomes something other than a story about disappointment.
Because while I was busy nursing my bruised feelings, my husband was doing what he has done so beautifully throughout our lives together.
He was paying attention.
He knew.
He knew exactly what that silence meant to me.
And instead of dismissing my feelings or telling me I shouldn't care, he reminded me of everything that had brought me to that day.
The countless hours at my computer.
The endless revisions.
The frustration.
The research.
The mornings spent staring at sentences that refused to cooperate.
The cups of coffee.
Good Lord, the coffee.
The times our children heard, "Just one more minute," while I desperately tried to finish a thought before it disappeared.
He remembered all of it.
He'd been there for all of it.
And he reminded me that none of that work became less meaningful because someone else forgot to acknowledge it.
He didn't tell me not to be disappointed.
He told me I could be disappointed and still be proud.
That both things could exist at once.
That I'd accomplished something extraordinary for myself, not as a performance for the people I hoped would applaud.
And then he helped me celebrate.
Not with some elaborate production designed to compensate for what was missing.
But with the people who had been showing up all along.
Our friends.
Our wonderfully imperfect, honest, hilarious, occasionally inappropriate friends.
The kind of people who will tell you when you're being ridiculous.
Who celebrate your victories without turning them into competitions.
Who don't need you to be polished or impressive or particularly interesting to deserve a seat at the table.
The kind of friends you can pee in front of.
Yes, I'm aware that's a peculiar measure of intimacy.
But if you know, you know.
These are the people who have listened to my endless ideas, entertained my questions, offered opinions, helped me solve problems, and encouraged me when I was convinced I'd made a terrible mistake.
They have watched this book come together.
They know what it means to me.
And when the time came to celebrate, they showed up.
There was food.
There was laughter.
There was love.
There was an entirely reasonable amount of celebratory ice cream cake, which may or may not have included a third slice.
Nobody questioned it.
Because these are my people.
And somewhere in the middle of that evening, I realized something.
I'd spent so much time thinking about who hadn't acknowledged my accomplishment that I was in danger of overlooking the people who were actively celebrating it.
The ones sitting right in front of me.
The ones who had made space in their lives for my excitement.
The ones who weren't obligated to love me, support me, or care about the strange fictional world I'd created.
But chose to anyway.
There's something extraordinary about being chosen.
Family is complicated.
Love is complicated.
And I don't believe that one disappointing moment erases years of affection, shared experiences, or the relationships that helped shape us.
I love my family.
That hasn't changed.
But I am beginning to understand that loving people doesn't mean they will always meet you where you need them to.
And perhaps growing older means learning to accept that without continually breaking your own heart over it.
It also means recognizing that community doesn't have to look the way you once imagined.
Sometimes it looks like the family you were born into.
Sometimes it's the family you've created.
Sometimes it's a friend who reads the same paragraph six times because you're convinced something is wrong with it.
Sometimes it's someone who brings dinner, pours another drink, or cuts you an outrageously large slice of cake.
And sometimes it's a complete stranger on the internet who reads something you've written and says, I understand exactly what you mean.
That last one has been particularly surprising.
Since beginning this publishing journey, I've started connecting with people I might never have encountered otherwise.
Readers. Writers. People who love mysteries. People who simply love books.
People who share their own experiences, offer encouragement, ask thoughtful questions, and take a genuine interest in something I've created.
I never expected that part.
I thought publishing a novel would primarily be about putting a story into the world.
I didn't anticipate how much it might expand my own.
There's something beautiful about that.
About discovering that connection can begin with something as simple as a shared interest, a few words exchanged, or a story that resonates.
About realizing that people don't have to know your entire history to care about what you're doing right now.
And perhaps that's the lesson hiding beneath all this disappointment.
Not that family doesn't matter.
Not that expectations are foolish.
Not that we should stop hoping the people we love will show up for us.
But that our communities are often larger, more unexpected, and more beautiful than the ones we inherited.
We get to build them.
We get to nurture them.
We get to recognize the people who make us feel seen and make room for more of those connections in our lives.
Moving to North Carolina gave me physical distance from the expectations I'd spent years trying to satisfy.
Writing gave me a way to reconnect with a part of myself I'd nearly forgotten.
Publishing gave me the opportunity to share that part of myself with other people.
And disappointment, uncomfortable as it was, helped me recognize the community that had quietly formed around me.
I wish my family had remembered.
I won't pretend otherwise.
I wish I'd received those messages, those phone calls, those small acknowledgments that would have meant so much.
But I also wouldn't trade the evening I had.
The laughter.
The conversations.
The people gathered around me.
The extraordinary feeling of being celebrated without having to ask.
Both things are true.
I was hurt.
And I was loved.
I was disappointed.
And I was surrounded by people who made me feel incredibly fortunate.
Perhaps that's what makes life so interesting.
It rarely gives us one emotion at a time.
And sometimes the most meaningful connections emerge while we're busy grieving the ones we thought would look different.
So here's to the people who show up.
The ones who remember.
The ones who listen.
The ones who celebrate your accomplishments without needing to understand every detail of how you got there.
The ones who make you feel welcome, not merely familiar.
The ones who remind you that you are allowed to become someone new without apologizing for the person you used to be.
And here's to the new connections.
The unexpected friendships.
The readers and writers and wonderfully curious humans who find one another through stories.
I'm beginning to think that one of the greatest gifts of creating something is discovering who it connects you to.
I wrote a novel because I wanted to tell a story.
I never imagined it might help me find more of my people.
And that?
That's a pretty fucking beautiful surprise.