The Rooms We Aren't Expected to Live In

Notes for the un-journaled life

People tend to get frantic when they see a room falling apart don't they? If you tell someone you’re in a season that doesn’t resolve neatly, they will immediately hand you a hammer. It comes in the form of a self-help book, a gratitude journal, a framework, or some well-meaning advice that arrives before you’ve even finished the sentence. They want to help you reframe the mess, mostly because we are a species obsessed with the before-and-after shot. A space in transition makes people feel untethered, so they reach for a tool to make it make sense.

But what if the room isn’t a project? What if you’re just living in it for a while, and that is, in itself, a completely legitimate thing to be doing? 

I’m an engineer with an unreasonable number of degrees, including an Executive MBA (we’ll talk about that another time), so I understand the impulse to optimize better than most. My entire career has been spent improving processes and proving how organizations can work more effectively. When I see a structural failure, my first instinct is always to reach for the tool belt, and that reflex has served me well in boardrooms. It has never once worked in the rooms that don’t come with a blueprint. The more I tried to productively optimize my way through the complicated seasons, the more I felt like I was failing at the one thing I couldn’t actually fail at: being human.

I have spent a significant portion of my life in rooms I never RSVP’d to. The room of sudden loss. The room of the immigrant life, where you are constantly translating your soul into a language that doesn’t quite have the right words for your grief, your anger, or your specific and un-Googleable pain. The room of the relationship that ended but was never officially named. The room of the career that no longer fits the person you’ve become. The room of the messy middle, where nothing has resolved yet but everything already feels like it has shifted.

The world is full of people watching us standing in those rooms and handing us hammers. They mean well, they really do. They want us to find the lesson, reframe the pain, or journal our way to a breakthrough, and they treat our internal rooms like a project management task with a quarterly deadline. What they don’t often consider is that sometimes the room isn’t broken. It’s just the room we’re currently in.

Sometimes, the room isn’t broken. It’s just… the room we are currently in.

I live in Munich now, a city that prizes order and precision, and by day I sit in the world of high-tech stacks and twenty years of corporate experience. It is a world of data and clear outcomes. When I go home at the end of the day, I carry a Shona word that doesn’t have a direct German or English equivalent: moyo. It literally translates to heart, but it means so much more than that. It is the seat of courage, the gut-truth, the place where the un-journaled life actually lives. It’s from here that Stella’s Daughter is being slowly and carefully built.

I’m not building Stella’s Daughter because I have the blueprints for a better life. I am building it because I was tired of being given advice when I really just needed a witness. I wanted a place where fury and strange observations and half-formed thoughts could sit on the same page without anyone telling me to find the silver lining, a place that felt like my mom’s hugs, where I would not be asked to perform resilience, gratitude, or growth. I wanted, simply, to be witnessed.

And I suspect I am not the only one. If you’re standing in a room you didn’t choose, whatever that room looks like for you, this place is for you. Not to fix the room, and certainly not to hand you a hammer. Just to sit with you in it, for as long as you need, and to let you stay as long as you like.

Until next time,

Wadzi, the daughter behind Stella’s Daughter

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