Friday Night, Glass of Red, and the Weight I'm Done Pretending Isn't There
A poetic moment of reality — William Rochelle
Every Friday carries a kind of closing sound, like a door pulling shut behind another week that ended without resolution. I know that sentence sounds measured. It is not. Sixteen months of living in survival mode does not feel measured. It feels like standing in open water while people on the shore debate whether you are waving or drowning, and you are too tired to explain that both can be true at the same time.
To call this painful would be the understatement of my adult life. Painful is a word for a pulled muscle or a bad conversation. This is something that lives in the space behind your sternum and wakes up with you every single morning, and you still button your shirt and show up because that is who you are. That has always been who you are. But tonight, for the first time in a long time, I am going to say out loud what sixteen months of this actually feels like. It feels like the walls are crushing in. It feels like a box I cannot find the edge of, no matter how much light I try to bring into it. I do not know what to do with that. I am saying that plainly. I do not know what to do.
I give the best of me to the people around me, and when I say best, I am not talking about perfection. I mean the truest, most complete version of what I have available in that moment. I know I can always do better. I know growth is not a destination. But I genuinely try. Every time. Not for recognition. Not for a receipt. Just because that is how I was built. So when I watch someone decide to discard me because I said something imperfect, or because I did not align with their brand, or because I reached into the dark and tried to pull myself and everyone around me into the light, and even that landed wrong, something breaks a little. It is small. But it accumulates.
Yesterday I made a joke. A joke said with love. A joke that came from the part of me that was actively trying to climb out of my own darkness and bring someone else up with me. That joke rubbed someone the wrong way. That is the thing I cannot quite put down tonight. Not anger. Not blame. Just the ache of realizing that even when the intention is love, even when the effort is real, it is still possible to get it wrong. To be received wrong. To mean warmth and leave a mark.
The problem is not entirely theirs, and I have been honest with myself about that tonight. The problem is mine, in the sense that I have carried a feeling my whole life that I am disposable. Not unloved in the moment. Not unwelcome in the room. But disposable. As in, once I have nothing left to offer, once the relationship has drained what it needed from me, the relationship is over. People tell me that those people do not matter. But that is not the point. It has never been about those people. It is about the pattern. The pattern is the thing that will not let me go.
So tonight is Friday, and I am fine, and I will be jolly if you catch me on the phone, but I am also pouring a glass of red wine for the first time since October. I am putting my phone on do not disturb. I am going to cancel most of my weekend plans, including my show. This is not a cry. This is not a collapse. This is me finally sitting down with myself the way I have asked other people to do with themselves for years, and admitting that I am carrying weight I have not let myself feel out loud.
The blows keep coming, and I have been trained to absorb them quietly so I can walk back into the room as the light. I push the frustration down, smooth it flat, and then I show up and be the person who lifts the energy and holds the space and makes you feel like tomorrow is worth believing in. I believe that. I genuinely believe it. But I am doing that from inside a box that gets smaller every week, and nobody on the outside can see the walls moving.
These are facts, not feelings, and I will not apologize for the sentence I just wrote. People say that business is facts and feelings are noise. But my feelings are real. They are documented. They have timestamps. They have names. When I reach for love and it offends, and when I stay quiet and it disappoints, there is a word for that experience. Damned if I do. Damned if I do not. Some of the people inside this chapter meant more to me than they will ever know, and that is the part of the truth that cuts the deepest on a Friday night in April.
What I know, even through all of this, is that a person who has given without expectation for sixteen months inside a box with walls that keep closing is not weak. That person is extraordinary. I am still here. The wine is poured. The phone is dark. The weekend is mine. Sometimes the most honest thing you can do for the people you love and the work you believe in is to stop and feel the full weight of the moment, rather than carry it for everyone else. Tonight I feel it. All of it. Without apology.
I will be back on Monday, and I will mean it when I am.
Thanks for reading,
William Rochelle, but you can call me Bill.
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