I Didn’t Smooth It Over This Time

Sustainable pace at work isn’t about doing less — it’s about not carrying what isn’t yours.

I’m very good at reading rooms.
Always have been.

I clock tone, mood, power dynamics, who’s slightly off, who’s about to snap, who needs managing — all of it — within minutes. Sometimes seconds. It’s not a skill I learned deliberately. It’s just… there.

And for most of my life, once I’d read the room, I’d adjust myself accordingly.

A joke here.
A softening there.
A story to bridge the awkward bit.
A quiet self-edit so no one feels uncomfortable — including me.

Yesterday, I didn’t do that.

What a Sustainable Pace at Work Looks Like in Real Life

It was one of those workdays where the room had weight to it.

Deadlines pressing in, decisions stacking up, the bosses away, which meant the centre of gravity quietly shifted to the three of us — competent, opinionated, carrying our own histories and sensitivities like invisible backpacks.

One of them is my daughter. Which already complicates things in ways I don’t need to unpack here.

Another has held a strange kind of power over me since the day we met — nothing overt, just enough that my system tends to sit up a little straighter around her.

In the past, I would have absorbed any friction straight into my body, like it was my emotional responsibility to compost it into something palatable. A sharp comment would land, a look would flicker, and I’d quietly take it on as a personal project — smoothing, contextualising, making sure no one felt uncomfortable, least of all me.

Yesterday, the reflex arrived right on cue — that familiar internal flurry where my system starts scanning for who’s about to be annoyed, who feels slightly undermined, and what subtle adjustment I could make to keep the temperature just right.

And then I didn’t fucking do anything.

I didn’t lean in. I didn’t soften my tone. I didn’t offer context, humour, or a gentle reframe. I didn’t pick up the emotional baton and start running laps with it. I sat there, in my chair, inside my body, and let the moment be exactly as clunky, unfinished, and mildly irritating as it wanted to be.

The jealousy still spiked — of course it did. That sharp little flare of why does she get asked, since when does she know best, how did this quietly become her call. It moved fast, hot and petty and very human, and for once I didn’t pretend it was something more evolved than it was.

I felt it.
I clocked it.
And then I let it bounce straight off me.

No story.
No meaning-making.
No internal PowerPoint presentation about what this said about me.

What changed instead was physical. I leaned back. My shoulders dropped. I stopped hovering energetically over the room like an unpaid emotional project manager. The dynamic didn’t collapse. No one imploded. Decisions still happened.

And for the first time in a long time, I left work without carrying everyone else’s unfinished business home with me. That’s what a sustainable pace at work looks like for me now — staying present without absorbing the room.

What I Took Home Instead

What stayed with me afterwards wasn’t pride or some sense of having handled it well. It was how ordinary it felt once I stopped interfering. Slightly anticlimactic, actually — like discovering the machine doesn’t explode if you stop yanking levers you were never officially hired to operate in the first place.

Because usually, days like that follow me home. They replay themselves while I’m chopping vegetables or brushing my teeth, turning into a low-grade hum of irritation that leaks out sideways — impatience, sharpness, a general sense that everyone else is being mildly unreasonable.

Yesterday, I came home tired — properly, honestly tired — but clean.

No looping conversations.
No imaginary arguments in the shower.
No residue clinging to me like static.

Just space.

Which is how I know something shifted.

What Changed When I Stopped Intervening

I’ve been writing a lot lately about pace — not productivity, not ambition, but the speed at which my nervous system can stay online without turning everything into work. There’s solid research on how emotional vigilance affects nervous system regulation.

This was one of those moments where the idea showed up in real life.

I didn’t dominate the room.
I didn’t disappear from it either.

I stayed where I was and let the room organise itself around that.

Which sounds obvious when you write it down, but feels mildly rebellious when you’ve spent a lifetime acting as unpaid emotional infrastructure.

This is what a sustainable pace looks like for me now. Not a grand slowing down of life, not a dramatic reinvention — just fewer invisible jobs running in the background. Less self-appointed responsibility for other people’s comfort. More trust that I don’t need to earn my place in the room by managing everyone else’s experience of it.

It’s not serene. It’s not polished. The jealousy still pops up, the old instincts still clear their throats occasionally, and some days I absolutely want wine before I want insight.

But something fundamental has shifted.

I leave more of myself where I am.
I take less of everyone else with me.

And that, it turns out, changes everything.

Why I’m Sharing This

I’m sharing this because this is what it looks like when an old reflex doesn’t run the show for once.

Not a breakthrough.
Not a personality upgrade.
Just a small, ordinary moment where I didn’t step in, didn’t smooth, didn’t manage — and nothing fell apart.

I’ve spent a lot of my life adapting to rooms without even noticing I was doing it – different versions of me for different spaces, different people, different expectations. It worked, until it didn’t. Until it started costing me more than it was giving back.

This moment at work wasn’t special. That’s kind of the point.

I stayed where I was. I left the room the way I found it. And I didn’t take everyone else home with me.

I’ve written before about how that adapting reflex formed in the first place — long before work, deadlines, or meeting rooms were involved:

A Quiet Identity Shift: When Adaptation Stops Working

That’s where this thread really begins.

For now, I’m paying attention to what happens when I don’t intervene — and letting that be enough to keep me curious about what comes next.