LOVE WINS ERA · THINK ABOUT THIS

The Door

Tue, 08 Sep 2026

Sometimes a door is just a door...

Sometimes it isn't.

A few years ago, there was a house I had helped save from a tax auction.

I don't believe that helping someone save their home purchases a claim on the home or the person living inside it.

It doesn't.

Love is not a mortgage. Care is not currency.

Helping someone through a crisis does not purchase permanent access to their life.

But there is something uniquely painful about fighting to help someone keep a home that you later discover you don't really have a place inside. Especially when the door isn't particularly difficult for anyone else to walk through. People come over. People hang out. People stay. People wander in and out. People who don't contribute seem completely comfortable there.

Even people who have taken things that weren't theirs somehow remain part of the ecosystem. Yet the person who supposedly occupies this enormously important emotional role remains somewhere outside the door.

Eventually you have to stop arguing with yourself about what that feels like. I could help save the home, but I could not belong in it.

That sentence has stayed with me.

Because eventually the house stopped being about a house. It became a physical representation of something I had been trying very hard not to understand.

People Make Room for What They Want

This is uncomfortable because people can tell us almost anything. Actions are considerably less imaginative.

People make room for the things they prioritize. They are complicated, overwhelmed, traumatized, distracted and occasionally spectacularly bad at managing their own lives. But over time, patterns become information.

Look around someone's life. What gets protected? What gets tolerated? Who gets access? Who is expected to understand? Who is repeatedly forgiven? Who gets a chair? And who is always standing outside?

At some point, I had to stop listening exclusively to what I was being told and start looking at what I was being shown.

That was harder.

If you need me, I will be 42 Degrees From Here.

Brandy Lee Novak