The Flop

everyone needs a couch

“You help so many people, you can’t remember them all. How beautiful is that?”

A friend texted me that this morning, and I had to read it a few times. She meant it as a compliment, and I took it as one.

The context of her note was that she was asking to move a “deadline.” This is something I do for friends and coaching clients: I put it on the calendar to make it real — IT WORKS — and apparently I had forgotten I’d done it for her.

I sat with her text for a minute.

I’ve been thinking about this recently: Where can you actually flop down? And I don’t mean flop like a failure. I mean flop like you just dropped your bag at the door and exhaled for the first time all day.

I’m a pretty extreme extrovert. I love people, I love a room, I love being the one who sends out the invites and opens the door. But even I need a couch to lie down on sometimes. Literally and figuratively.

The first time I really understood this, I was a freshman in college. I was in a picture-perfect college town, having what should have been the most charmed first semester ever. I saw familiar faces everywhere I looked. Friends a few years older than me told me which classes to register for and picked me up to drive around campus.

And then something bad happened. Something really bad. A classmate from home died in an accident, just blocks from my dorm. There was a candlelight vigil, a funeral, and a kind of low-grade shock that just sat there. My mom drove up and took me to dinner. That helped. But the real flop came a few weeks later at Thanksgiving. It was the first time I’d been home since the semester started, and I remember walking into the warm house, the smell of it, and just landing on the couch with actual relief.

My aunt and uncle’s house had that feeling, too. Sunday brunches, every Sunday, and the Super Bowl. To get inside, you walked in through the side door without ringing the doorbell. You never rang the doorbell. The smell of burnt onions hit you first, ready to be mixed with eggs and lox on the stove, bagels already cut and in a giant bowl on the table. Too many bagels, even for the large crowd that would be filtering through. You didn’t have to announce yourself. You just showed up, and you were there.

That’s the thing about a real flop. You don’t have to explain or announce yourself. You just show up.

It’s not just places, though. It’s people, too.

It has almost nothing to do with how long you’ve known someone. I’ve spent time with people I genuinely love and come home more tired than when I left. Something about the dynamic, everyone operating at different speeds, or needing to be a certain version of yourself the whole time. You come back, and you need a break from your break.

And then there are the other hangs. A lunch, a dinner, a summer afternoon that becomes evening without anyone noticing. You get up from the table and feel like yourself again, maybe more yourself than when you sat down. Those are the ones where you send the text on the way home: “That was just the best,” or “How lucky are we?”

I have a friend, a couple of neighborhoods away, whose bed I can literally lie down on when life is too loud. I walk in, I don’t knock on the door, naturally, and whatever is swirling stays outside for a little while.

My sister’s house is that way, too. Even though she had toddlers running around, sometimes literally sitting on my head, it feels like a warm blanket of a place.

And then there was this:

Sammy was six months old. We had decided — and I use that word loosely — that opening a pizzeria and having a baby at the same time was fine timing. (It was not.) My family was in Michigan. The friends I had made weren’t yet in the friends-like-family category. I was exhausted and bleary-eyed, and now, looking back, I definitely had postpartum depression.

I have a best friend who lives across the country. I knew her house was a place I could land, even with a six-month-old baby in tow. She was childfree at the time, on her holiday break, with no particular reason to take us in.

I didn’t wait for an invitation. “I booked a flight,” I announced.

And I flew across the country, alone with Sammy, which should have been hard but didn’t feel worse than anything else I’d been going through. We didn’t do too much. There were lunches with the baby, back for a nap, and I think we took him to a winery. I was so relieved to be there. To have someone looking after me for once.

I cried when I left.

It’s not that I mind being the person that everyone leans on. I really don’t. Being someone’s soft place to land is one of the things I’m most proud of. It’s why I do the work I do. It’s why I built the community I built. Making people feel better, more seen, more held, more connected is not a burden to me. It’s my gift, my superpower, and I cherish having it.

But somewhere along the way, I had to learn something (and I’m talking to myself here!): The person everyone flops on still needs a couch.

Because when you’re the host, the helper, the one with the open door, it can feel strange to admit you need one yourself. Almost like a contradiction.

I think about the people in my life who are my flop. The friend whose bed I can lie down on. The summer afternoons that turn into evenings. The table I leave feeling more like myself than when I sat down. The best friend across the country who didn’t hesitate for a second when I announced that I booked a flight. I don’t think they always know what they’re giving me, and that’s the thing about a real flop. It’s not transactional. Nobody’s keeping score. You just show up, and there’s room.

That text this morning stopped me. You help so many people, you can’t remember them all. She meant it as a compliment, and I took it as one. But it was also a reminder that I am lucky to have so many couches, and I should make use of them

xx,

Leah