The Ones Who Stay Home
I’ve never really been one for groups.
Not the loud ones, not the sparkly ones, not the ones with matching shirts and group chats and planned weekends. I’ve tried — more than once. I’ve brought baked goods. I’ve memorized names. I’ve smiled at the right moments and nodded in all the right places.
But I always leave feeling like I brought the wrong version of myself.
Some women bloom in rooms full of people. They shine at the center of things, magnetic and certain. I admire them. But I’ve always been a woman of corners. Of polite exits. Of scanning the crowd for one empty chair near a plant or a window.
I like to be home. I like the rhythm of the washing machine and the soft clutter of things I’ve chosen. I like long afternoons that spill into evening without asking permission. I like watching the light change in familiar rooms.
I work from home, parent from home, exist from home. My world is built in these quiet spaces — not because I’m hiding, but because this is where I feel most like myself.
I read a lot. I write when I can. I talk to plants and hum when I do the dishes. Sometimes I feel invisible, but mostly I feel anchored.
The truth is, I do not always fit. Not in group threads. Not in networking circles. Not in the quick, buzzy tempo the world keeps.
But I have come to believe that fitting in was never the goal.
There is a rhythm to stillness, a cadence of noticing. I see things others miss — how someone glances at their hands when they’re nervous, how the garden tilts slightly toward the morning light, how words settle differently when written slowly.
I have friends, but not many. I am loved, but not often surrounded. And I’m learning that’s okay. Some of us are not meant for spotlight or spectacle. Some of us are meant for tea kettles, for well-worn books, for quiet magic stitched into ordinary hours.
We are the ones who stay home.
Who write and stir soup and build lives no one claps for — but that matter, quietly, deeply, anyway.
—L.B.
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