I’ve been spending more time lately trying to understand where certain parts of myself come from. Not in a dramatic, soul-searching way — just in the quiet realization that some of my long-held habits aren’t just habits anymore. They’ve shaped how I move through the world. It turns out a lot of them were shaped long before I ever realized it.
I grew up in a small town where everything overlapped. My parents both worked in the local school system, which meant they knew a lot of people — and a lot of people knew them. Privacy wasn’t a rare thing, but it felt different. There was this natural awareness that most things traveled. Even at home, my dad’s cousin, Uncle Randy, lived three doors down but somehow had a perfect view of our driveway from his couch. He didn’t even have to get up to clock who was coming or going. That was the atmosphere I grew up in — nothing dramatic, just a subtle sense of being visible, of life happening in a way others could easily notice.
You adapt to that environment without even realizing you’re doing it. You become good at reading situations, steadying yourself before stepping into them, keeping certain things internal because you learn early what tends to move through a community and what doesn’t need to. Kids don’t analyze any of this — they just absorb it, and it becomes the background texture of who they are.
I didn’t connect any of that to my adult life until recently. Only now can I see how much that upbringing made me more attentive, more careful, more attuned to what’s happening around me. It gave me an internal steadiness that people see as confidence, but to me has always felt more like responsibility. It taught me how to keep my inner world tucked slightly behind a curtain, not because I was hiding anything, but because containment felt easier than exposure.
As an adult, it shows up everywhere. I’m the one who plans, organizes, sets the tone, and makes sure things keep moving. I’m the one who instinctively anticipates what might go wrong. Hosting relaxes me because I finally get to set the pace. People assume I like control because I’m particular or a perfectionist, but the truth is much simpler: control feels like quiet. It feels like knowing what’s coming. And when I’ve spent so much of my life bracing for the unexpected, quiet feels like home.
That preparedness shaped more than just how I move through social situations — it shaped how I work. In IT, chaos is never theoretical. Systems go down, services fail, outages hit out of nowhere. But my brain knows how to live there. Redundancy, disaster recovery, failover planning — these aren’t abstract concepts to me; they feel familiar. They match the way my mind has always tried to stay one step ahead. When everything melts, I stabilize. When others are scrambling, I’m already mapping the order of operations. The instincts that small-town life built — the vigilance, the scanning, the readiness — turned into clarity in the middle of a crisis.
But those same instincts can harden when I’m not paying attention. Preparedness turns into overthinking. Anticipation turns into self-editing. The part of me that handles everything so well can keep me from letting people in. It can make me script moments that don’t need scripting. It can make me hold things I didn’t even realize I was holding.
So I’ve been working on softening that a little. Allowing myself to show up without polish. Letting moments unfold instead of managing them. Letting people see me without the pre-processing. Loosening the reflex to anticipate everything before it happens. Learning to be known instead of just reliable.
And honestly, I’m starting to like the version of myself that comes through when I do that.
He’s thoughtful, perceptive, loyal, a little guarded in ways that make perfect sense, and stronger than he remembers.
He’s learning.
He’s loosening.
He’s exhaling.
And for the first time, he’s not trying to impress the world that shaped him —
he’s trying to understand himself inside it.