The Walk That Had Nothing to Do With Walking

I thought I was observing people. I was observing myself.

Photo by Thom Milkovic on Unsplash

I started taking the long way home last winter.

Why? I needed the space.

The streetlamps haven’t been fixed in months. I walk it anyway. Something about the darkness felt easier than whatever I was trying to leave behind.

A colleague has a habit of speaking before thinking.

Or perhaps she thinks quickly, and I simply don’t follow.

Either way, she says things in meetings that leave a mark.

Not cruel things.

Not dramatic things.

Just observations, sometimes about my work, sometimes about my choices… that land in a particular way.

I always nod.

I always say something smooth.

I always appear entirely unbothered.

But somewhere between the office and my apartment, the nod quietly unravels.

I begin the argument I didn’t have.

I say the things I didn’t say.

I rearrange the whole scene and step into it with better words, better timing, better composure.

Sometimes I win comprehensively.

Sometimes I simply make myself understood.

The strange part was that she was never really in those conversations.

Only I was.

I had been doing this for years with different people in different places.

I just hadn’t noticed it quite so clearly before.

For a long time, I sorted the people in my life into two quiet categories.

Those who made me feel capable.

And those who made me feel like I was constantly being measured.

I never said it in those terms.

I said we didn’t quite click.

Or that certain people had a way of making rooms feel smaller.

I told myself I was perceptive.

That I read people well.

Looking back, I think I was reading myself and attributing it to them.

There’s a wooden bench at the end of that dark stretch of road.

I started sitting on it on warmer evenings.

Not long. Ten minutes, maybe.

Long enough to notice I was still carrying the morning with me.

One evening, I asked myself something I hadn’t thought to ask before.

Not: what’s wrong with her?

But: why does this follow me home?

It sounds like a small shift.

It was not a small shift.

That question asked me to stop looking outward and start looking at the person doing all the looking.

What I found there was a little uncomfortable.

I found someone who believed they were composed.

Measured.

Largely free from ego in professional settings.

That belief held up beautifully when things went well.

When someone acknowledged my work, I accepted it graciously.

When someone challenged it, something quietly tightened.

Not visibly.

But I felt it.

That tightening wasn’t her problem.

It was information about me.

I also noticed something about how I remembered things.

Praise from that same colleague, and she had offered it more than once, dissolved quickly.

I received it, smiled, moved on.

But the comments that stung?

I could recall the exact seating arrangement.

The light in the room.

Who was refilling their water when she said it.

My mind was not an impartial archive.

It had preferences.

It kept what unsettled me and quietly released what soothed me.

That asymmetry was worth paying attention to.

I started spending those ten minutes on the bench differently.

Less rehearsing.

More noticing.

I began to see the conditions I had built around my own sense of ease.

I’ll feel settled when she makes a change.

I’ll stop worrying when she learns how to frame things.

I’ll enjoy the work more when she gives me space.

None of this was ever spoken aloud.

But I had been operating inside it for months.

Those conditions weren’t really about her.

They were the architecture of a peace that had never truly been unconditional.

I’m not suggesting I should have had no reaction.

Some reactions are honest and necessary.

Some distances are healthy.

Some things genuinely need to change.

But the reaction I had been recycling every evening was not protecting me.

It was keeping me occupied.

Occupied with a version of events that existed only inside my own mind… carefully tended, never quite resolved.

The colleague is still there.

She still says things that land a certain way.

I still notice the tightening.

But the walk home is different now.

Less rehearsing what I should have said.

More asking what the reaction is quietly telling me.

Some evenings I have an answer.

Some evenings I don’t, and I sit with that too.

The long way home hasn’t gotten any shorter.

But somewhere along it, I stopped trying to reach a verdict about her.

I started arriving at questions about myself instead.

Perhaps that is what certain people give us, without intending to, without ever knowing.

Not resolution.

Not understanding.

Just a reason to look in a direction we had been quietly avoiding for a very long time.

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