The Gaping Door
There’s a moment that comes not from confusion, but from recognition.
You can feel it before you name it.
Life stacks its unscripted moments quickly:
illness,
surgery,
risk,
grief,
caretaking,
mortality brushing close enough to leave a mark.
Nothing about these moments is optional.
They arrive already requiring a response.
And slowly, without announcement, you move into a role.
The supporter.
The stabilizer.
The witness.
The one who holds fear, logistics, emotions, and often not their own.
What shifts isn’t just your calendar.
It’s your nervous system.
Your internal calibration changes.
Energy moves outward.
Vigilance increases.
Capacity is spent on maintaining stability.
So when you think,
This is when I should be protecting my space the most,
what actually happens is the opposite.
Your system is already open.
Already responding.
Already extending.
The door doesn’t swing open because you’re careless.
It opens because it has to.
And sometimes (this is the part I hadn’t named)
We don’t just let energy in.
We extend the table.
Not because it’s aligned.
Not because it’s nourishing.
But because filling space is easier than sitting with the emptiness underneath.
When life has hollowed things out through crisis and caretaking or, as I heard today, life ‘lifing’ you.
Open space doesn’t feel peaceful.
It feels exposed.
Silence asks questions.
Stillness makes room for sensation.
Unfilled space requires presence.
And presence can feel heavier than motion when the system is already stretched.
Chaos, at least, has momentum.
It gives the nervous system something familiar to organize around.
So I reach outward.
Not because I want more in the room,
But because it’s easier than tending to what hasn’t been metabolized yet.
That’s when misaligned energy slips in.
Not by invitation, by capacity.
Through the gaping door.
You start to notice it everywhere.
In yourself.
In the neighbor who can’t slow their sentence down.
The person in front of you at the market is distracted, brittle, and moving faster than the moment requires.
And yes, at work.
The person who rushes in late, already apologizing.
The urgency that arrives before the question.
The meeting that never quite settles.
The pace that doesn’t allow for feeling because there isn’t time.
The person who cannot lead you because they cannot see you through the gaping door.
Not because people don’t care.
But because their systems are already carrying too much.
This is human e-motion in motion.
Energy that accelerates.
Extends.
Spills.
Sometimes what looks like urgency is simply an unprocessed experience
looking for somewhere to go.
No conclusion.
No correction.
Just noticing.
And maybe a little more room to breathe in the void.
At a table for one.
Author's Note:
The last weeks of 2025 and the first of 2026 reopened a capacity threshold I wasn’t ready for, though no one ever is.
This isn’t written from victimhood or martyrdom.
It’s written from truth.
I’ve experienced life in motion, a series of unscripted moments in quick succession, and this is what it looks like to stay untethered inside them: aware, affected, and still paying attention.
Jackie J. is a leadership coach and writer. She works with leaders and teams in the in-between spaces of change, helping them reclaim authorship through emotional intelligence and real conversation. Unscripted is a place for noticing what’s usually rushed past: leadership, identity, and the human mechanics underneath it all.