Today's Huddle is a little less polished than usual. A little less carefully constructed and more of a personal challenge from someone who's still in the middle of learning it.

For most of my life, I was the person you called when something needed to be handled.

The most direct friend and the one who took the least amount of shit. 

If there was a difficult conversation nobody else wanted to have, it landed with me. And I never questioned whether I wanted it to.

Probably because I got satisfaction out of making an example out of someone who reminded me of adults from my past who never got held accountable.

I was heavily rewarded for that.

For a long time, I thought it meant I had integrity.

But what I didn't see was how much of it wasn't about solving anything at all.

It was about proving a point.

I made it my personal mission that whoever said something about me or something I cared about in my absence, and not to my face, got a phone call. And left that conversation knowing they weren't nearly as direct or as honest as they'd convinced themselves to be.

I didn’t want to “repair” things.

I wanted to fight. 

And I usually won. 

But it routinely cost me thirty minutes with people I didn't respect, who were never going to change, and who I'd forget about within a week.

It’s hard to admit the things we don’t like about ourselves.

Even harder to admit that our behaviors are the byproduct of old pain looking for somewhere to land.

It’s like two storms going on within us simultaneously. 

The old one — childhood, past experiences, unprocessed emotions.

And the present day one — the discomfort of being rejected, misread, or talked about by people who've never bothered to ask who you actually are.

Both take discipline to sit in without immediately trying to relieve them.

Learning to live inside these storms without destroying the village has been an active practice for almost a decade of my life.

Some days feel easier than others.

Some days still feel just as intense — like I've made no progress at all.

I will never sit here and tell you that working through your own patterns gets easier or that one day you "arrive" because "growth" isn't linear.

But what I can tell you is that learning to experience heightened emotions without immediately letting them make decisions for you is a practice worth the discomfort it costs you.

P.S. Not every opinion about you requires your rebuttal or participation. Letting someone think what they want without interjecting isn't weakness.

Always needing to address it is.