You’ve set the table, dinner is in the oven, guests should be showing up any minute.

You go the front door, you crack it open but… nobody’s there. Surely they got the invite, right? Did you mess up the date? Did you post or text enough about it?

Minutes, then hours, then the night is gone, and nobody came. A day or two pass and you start to feel a deep sense of woe and disrespect from those who said they’d show and didn’t.

I’m sure you have had an experience similar to this; maybe not exactly, but we’ve all had our share of let downs. Sucks, doesn’t it? Sometimes we give, and give, and give, and see a giant empty room when we were expecting the crop to be harvested.

I Used To Panic

I don’t know about you, but in the past I had a tendency to break down when things like that would happen. I would get mad at myself even after understanding that, realistically, no one is to blame.

I still struggle with that, but there is a bit of a hiccup before I fall into that loop of thinking that has saved me from spiraling and I would like to share that here.

(I’m sure you have heard someone say at some point that “everything happens for a reason” and I would hate for this post to get lost in that same trope, but there is a part that parallels with that saying so I just wanted to clarify!)

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What I Learned

Think In Fives

I remember having a conversation with Josh, my cofounder, about talking to my childhood self. We had gotten so deep into the conversation that I was thinking about what I would say for days afterward.

Then came a Friday night, a few conversations with my wife about my career, and me alone in the garage crying out to God asking for an answer.

Then I decided to start talking to me. Not childhood me, though; I talked to the me that came back to my parents house in that same garage and said I wouldn’t fail myself again. The me from Five years ago.

I talked to the me that was screaming and crying looking at the cieling wondering why I was the one that had to go through this (…dead give-away of how self centered I was when I touched back down but that’s another story…)

I spoke truth in to the past version of myself in that conversation and I think it rewired how I handle the things that tend to explode around me daily.

Expectations

One thing that became apparent in that “conversation” was that everyone elses expectations had weight heavy on my soul for quite a while. Wether those people knew that or not is one thing, but I put an extreme amount of weight on myself over them.

I started to develop a pattern at a young age of trying to please people, no matter what. Whether that meant saying the right things, being the funny one to make my friends laugh, or spreading gossip because it meant people were talking to me instead of ignoring me.

Looking back, I realize how often I let the fear of not meeting other people’s expectations drive my decisions, even when I knew what the right thing to do was.

Leave a Voicemail

Something I did shortly after that to try to process some grief and connect with my inner child was leaving a voice note on my phone like I was leaving a voicemail. I simply closed my eyes, suspended my disbeilef, and let my heart take over.

It kind of shocked me, if I’m being honest with you. I can’t tell you how much of the pain I carry/things I get mad about are things that I wanted to comfort my past self over. Some things I knew I wanted to say, some things I realized I was still feeling pain from even though I thought I had processed them.

I don’t know if that makes sense, but basically I realized that I was talking to my current self more than I wanted to admit.

When I shared that voicemail with Josh a few months later, I gave it another listen and realized that I was live annotating what was hurting at the time.

I think that’s why those moments hit me so hard. Somewhere along the way, I had convinced myself that their absence meant I wasn’t worth showing up for.

It was an eye opener.

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Lead with Love

So whether you leave a voicemail, go to your therapist, talk to a good friend about it, or look within in your own way, remember to lead with love.

And I don’t just mean for the people around you. I mean for yourself, too. Because if there’s one thing I’ve learned through all of this, it’s that I spent a whole lot of time worrying about whether I was enough for everyone else and not nearly enough time asking if I was being fair to myself.

You can have the best intentions, do everything you know how to do and still end up standing in that doorway screaming to the cieling wondering why nobody showed up.

But maybe that’s the part I’ve been missing. I can set the table, make the dinner, and leave the door open. I can’t make anyone walk through it.

And that’s okay.

I’d rather keep making room for people out of love than spend the rest of my life trying to earn their presence out of fear.

Just don’t forget to save yourself a seat.