You have been treating your life like an audition, and you are exhausted, because auditions are exhausting, and the cruelest part is that the panel left years ago and you are still up there hitting your marks for a room full of folding chairs.
You read the room before you read your own pulse. You laugh at the joke that is not funny, not a real laugh, the other one, the one you keep loaded so nobody feels awkward except you, later, in the car. You say yes while every cell spells N-O, because no might cost you the part. The part you already have. The lead. In your own life. Which you are, somehow, still auditioning for.
There is no casting director. Sit with that, because it is going to save your life. Nobody is keeping the scorecard you have been killing yourself to top. You invented the judges. You took your mother-in-law, your manager, the woman at church with opinions about your choices, and you promoted them to a tribunal that never once convened, and then you performed for them around the clock while they got on with their own anxious auditions and thought about you far less than you feared and far less kindly than you hoped.
You got the part the day you were born. Stop reading for the role you already own.
I am very good at reading a room. I can clock the mood of a gathering before my coat is off, who is sulking, who needs handling, where the landmines are buried. Useful talent. I am done calling it a gift. It was a survival skill, the kind you only build if you grew up somewhere the weather could turn on you and a wrong forecast had consequences.
And here is the bill nobody warned me about: read the room long enough and you lose the ability to read yourself. You get so fluent in everyone else's needs that your own go to voicemail. You become a woman who can name what every person at the table is feeling and cannot tell you what she wants for dinner. I have lost the thread of my own appetite at restaurants because I was so busy conducting everyone else's comfort. That is not generosity. That is self-erasure with excellent manners.