You Are the Leak

Whatever you are carrying right now, the people around you can feel it.

You treat your inner state as a private matter — contained, yours, no one else's concern. It is not private. It leaks. It crosses the space between you and the people near you and it lands on them, and it changes what they do, and most of the time none of you can even see it happening. What you feel does not stay in your body. It transmits.

One person's quiet dread tips the whole room toward dread. One person's steadiness tips it toward steady. It moves faster than any argument because it skips the thinking entirely. People do not decide to catch your state. They just catch it.

You do not get to have no effect.

There is no version of you that walks into a room and changes nothing. The man who believes he is neutral is not neutral — he is simply leaking whatever happened to be loudest in him that morning, unmanaged, onto everyone around him. Bring nothing on purpose and you still bring something: usually your unexamined mood, spread carelessly over people who did not deserve it. Neutral is not on the menu. It never was.

It is not a question of whether you influence the room and becomes a question of what you are willing to be responsible for. Because you are responsible either way. Every room you enter leaves a little different for you having been in it — steadier or shakier, lighter or heavier — and you authored the difference whether you meant to or not.

Most do this unconsciously, and badly. They walk through their lives leaking strain and doubt into every room, wondering why the rooms always seem to sink around them, never once suspecting they are the leak.

Do not be the leak.

You are going to change every room you walk into. That is settled. The only thing left to decide is whether the people in it are better or worse for having been near you.

Arrive with purpose. Bring what you would want to catch from someone else on the worst day of your life.