Something honest, sitting beside the unsaid

The fabric rips first…..

There was a new moon. 

Fresh starts. 

Clean slates. 

Intentions everywhere. 

And/but few write about what a new beginning costs, when it arrives uninvited. 

Sometimes the new-

kicks the door in 

and tears the old reality 

down the seam 

while we’re still living in it.

Perhaps you’re reading this between meetings. 

In the car before you go inside. 

In a bathroom at a party, phone glowing. 

Carrying something you haven’t said out loud to anyone. 

If so… stay a minute. 

This one is for you.

Can you relate?

🔥 Every day, another friend tells me a version of it. 

The one deciding to get sober, who just realized half the social life was built around the pour. 

The one with the resignation letter in drafts for months, rereading it at 2am. 

The one who has rehearsed the breakup in the shower so many times the shampoo knows the script. 

And I’m in my own. 

Different details… same tearing.

Or the quiet one. 

The one nobody warns us about because there’s nothing to photograph. No hand raised. No bruise. No witness. Just the sigh when we speak. The joke at our expense that lands a little too clean. The “that’s nice” when we share the thing that matters. Kind disrespect. Disrespect wearing a cardigan. It never hits us, so we never leave. We just get smaller… in a way that passes for good behavior.

Do you know what I mean?

🔸 A passive-aggressive loop is a gentle cage. It runs on our politeness. Every “it’s fine” is a bar we install ourselves. Polite. Quiet. Locked.

And then, in an instant, something clicks. A sentence. A glance across a table. A new moon. Nothing outside changes and everything inside does. We see the loop. Once it’s seen, it cannot be unseen. △

🐎 This whole year opened on a new moon. Chinese New Year arrived in February and began the year of the Fire Horse, a pairing that comes around once every sixty years. I hold that image as an invitation from a tradition I’m borrowing with respect. Fire, for energy that refuses to stay in the fireplace. The horse, for speed / courage / a restlessness that kicks at the stall door. The same tradition names the shadow too: volatile, impulsive, hard to manage. Maybe that’s why so many of us feel this year in our ribs. Something in us bolted. The rest of our life is still catching up.

🕊 Here’s the part that gets harsh. The people closest to us, the ones who knew every version of us, suddenly feel the farthest away. Sometimes that’s because they loved the old us. The old us was convenient. Predictable. Easy to explain. Some of them lied to keep that version intact… some to protect us, some to protect themselves, and from my lens we rarely get to know which. Maybe they don’t know either.

That’s the betrayal nobody names at dinner: the slow agreement that we would stay small so everyone else could stay comfortable. And/but… if we’re brave enough to hold two truths at once, some of that betrayal was ours too. Every time we swallowed the thing we meant to say. Every time we called disrespect “just how they are.”

And maybe the heaviest part is the silence. The thing we can’t tell anyone, because telling it makes it real, or because the people we’d normally tell are part of the story. So we carry it into the meeting. The grocery store. The group chat. Smiling.

🖤 So consider this a permission slip. Scream in the car if you can. Cry in the shower. Let it be ugly, in any way you can. Nobody has to see it for it to count. I know. And it’s OK.

Me too, in my own way. My teams are rearranging / growing / changing, and some days it’s all a blur. Which is why this is going on LinkedIn. It’s where we show up now. ✦ If LinkedIn can be for dating, it can be for f-cking feelings.

🜂 The spiritual world has a word for what comes next: ascension. From my lens, ascension feels like the elevator cable snapping. We rise, sure… but first we drop. The stomach goes. The floor goes. The roles go: the one who drinks, the one who stays late, the one who keeps the peace, the one who laughs it off. And for a moment there is nothing to hold.

So who are we when every role falls away?

7️⃣ I wrote a poem around that question becasue I saw the shift that had to happen between us. During a formal dinner. A number on a table. A seat beside someone from a different world, everyone dressed up, everyone smiling, everyone carrying something. Perhaps you can relate? 

Table 7

When I saw the number on the table 

I knew it was profound 

for more reasons than anyone might think

Not because seven was telling me where to sit 

or who to sit beside 

or how I was supposed to feel

But because somehow 

it gave me a way to understand 

what was happening between us.

You and your world 

me and mine

All arriving at the same little table 

carrying things no one else in the room 

could possibly see.

Love 

money 

power 

pain

Secrets 

lies 

trust 

family

Heartache 

all sitting politely beside hope

And everyone smiling.

Maybe this makes no sense to you

Maybe it does

Maybe it will make sense 

when you are older 

or standing somewhere else 

inside your own mind.

That is okay.

There is no judgment here

Only love

You asked me to participate in your life

And you already know 

I move through this world 

differently.

I have died many times.

That is not a joke.

And it is not nothing

It is something

Something bigger 

than buildings 

bigger than countries 

bigger than nations 

bigger, certainly, than whatever we think we own.

Death has a funny way of correcting scale

And yet

I come in a very simple container

I am still the button 

from that other poem

A very big deal 

if you happen to be the pants.

Otherwise,

Almost no one needs to notice me

And I am perfectly happy that way

Maybe that is why I noticed the table

Because seven does not need to announce itself, either

It was simply there

Holding a place

And you had placed me 

beside you

Your people around you 

my people around me

Except for a little while,

 there was no your people and my people

There were just people

Each carrying the unbearable 

and the beautiful

Often in the same body.

Each knowing some things 

and hiding others

Each loving imperfectly

Each afraid of losing something

Each having already lost something

Each still dressed for dinner

Still laughing

Still reaching across the table

Still passing the bread

Still here.

And perhaps that 

was the meaning of table 7

Not an answer

Not a prophecy

Not even a sign

Just a place where several worlds 

were allowed to touch

Without having to become the same world

And for one evening

That was enough.

Seven means different things 

depending on where in the world you learned to count

And perhaps depending on what your people learned to see

Long before you arrived

In Chinese tradition,

seven is complicated

I like that about it

It refuses to be only 

lucky or unlucky

Only light or dark

It has belonged to reunion 

and separation

To love and loss

To the living and to those who came before

There is a month 

when the distance between worlds is imagined thinner

There is remembrance

There are ancestors

There are lovers

There are ghosts

And maybe we inherit symbols 

the way we inherit other things

Without always knowing we are carrying them

Perhaps sometimes someone 

from outside our world 

can see the thing we are standing too close to see

And perhaps that is what I was doing 

beside you

Not knowing more-

Just standing at a different angle

Because what I saw at your table 

was not uncomplicated happiness

It was something much more beautiful

Happiness that had survived things

Celebration with memory

Love with consequences

Success with receipts

Families with fractures

Money with history

Power with loneliness

Truth sitting quietly beside the things 

no one was ready to say out loud

And everyone smiling

Not because any of it wasn’t there

But because all of it was

And still

There was dinner

There was laughter

There were photographs

There were people choosing to remain in the room

Perhaps that is one meaning 

of being alive

Then there is the seven 

from the world I learned

The seeker

The questioner

The number that looks at what everyone else can see

And asks

What else is here?

It goes underneath

Behind

Between

It does not confuse appearance with truth

Or truth with cruelty

It wants to know what remains

When the room empties

When the photographs are finished

When the beautiful clothes go back into closets

When the money cannot solve the problem

When power cannot make someone love you

When pride cannot keep someone

When the performance ends

And nobody needs to smile anymore

What remains?

Seven asks that question

Perhaps that is why I recognized it

Death has made me very interested 

in what remains

Once you have crossed that particular border

And somehow found yourself 

back here

You begin measuring wealth 

in stranger currencies

Who stayed

Who told the truth

Who could know something terrible about you 

and still protect your dignity

Who could have used your weakness 

and chose not to

Who could sit beside your pain 

without making it about theirs

Who had power and remained gentle

Who had been betrayed and did not become betrayal

Who had every reason to close their heart

And somehow

Didn’t

These things become 

very expensive

Everything else 

starts looking strangely cheap.

So when I saw the seven

And then realized you had put me beside you

I smiled

Because your seven 

and my seven 

do not have to mean the same thing

Neither do we

Maybe love is not understanding everything about another person

Maybe it is refusing to require 

that understanding before 

we treat their inner world as real

Maybe trust is not the absence of secrets

Maybe it is knowing what you could destroy 

and choosing instead to protect

Maybe family is not the people who know everything

Maybe sometimes 

it is simply the people who remain at the table

And maybe power is not what we have been taught to recognize at all

Maybe the most powerful person in a room

Is the one who no longer needs to win it.

I don’t know

Seven doesn’t know either

Seven asks

And perhaps that is why I like it

Because after everything I have seen

I have become less interested 

in people who have all the answers

And much more interested

in people brave enough 

to sit inside the questions

Beside each other

Without running

Without conquering

Without pretending.

You in your world

Me in mine

Close enough 

for the borders to soften

But not disappear

Because your seven 

doesn’t need to become mine

And mine 

doesn’t need to become yours

For us to recognize

That somehow

For one strange beautiful complicated evening

We were both sitting

At the same table.

Seven asks what remains. 

Perhaps the true you is whatever is still standing after the fabric rips. 

Dirt under the nails. 

Breathing hard. 

A little stunned. 

Very much alive.

The pivot comes without a map. 

Everyone wants the five steps. 

I keep finding one: the next honest breath. 

Then the next. 

Then the next. 

Not knowing where to go 

might be the first moment in years 

that nobody is steering us.

🌱 🌒 🜂 ♾️🌙 🐎 🔥 Sooooooooooo………

If you can, in any way you can, name one thing that snapped for you this season. 

Out loud, on paper, or in your mind. 

Maybe leave it unfixed for now, and let it simply be true.

The new moon doesn’t care whether we’re ready. 

And/but it keeps coming back, every month, like it knows we’ll want another chance. When the next one comes around… perhaps you’ll notice you’re standing a little differently.

⬇️ Next time… what happens when the people from the old life come knocking, asking for the old you back.

And if this found you on the right day, my inbox is open. I know. And it’s OK. 

xoxox

N