Save Your Best Self for Home
We have it backwards.
We smile at strangers. Say "please" and "thank you" to service staff and bite our tongues when someone at work pisses us off. We try to impress acquaintances with wit and humour and convince randoms of how great we are. We present our most polished selves to people whose names we don't even know, people who will forget us the moment we're out of sight.
Then we come home.
We kick off our shoes and our manners. We snap at our spouse for just wanting to talk. Roll our eyes at our siblings, dismiss our parents' concerns, and expect our best friends to absorb our worst moods without question. We dismiss their opinions and advice. We hand them our exhaustion, our frustration, our unfiltered reactions—all the emotional debris we've been holding back.
They hold our baggage until one day they don't.
Why do we do this? Why do we reserve our patience for strangers and our impatience for the people who love us most?
We think love means never having to say you're sorry. Or because we believe the people closest to us will love us no matter what, so we don't have to try as hard. We take their presence for granted, assuming they'll always be there to catch whatever we throw at them.
The world gets our best while they get our leftovers.
Or
Flip the script.
Save your smiles for family, patience for friends, and gentleness for the person who earnt it through years of showing up for you.
This doesn't mean suppressing real emotions. It means choosing how we express them. Taking a breath before we speak. Remembering that the person in front of us isn't our emotional punching bag—they're someone who chose to love us.
The stranger at the coffee shop gets one interaction with you. Your spouse gets thousands. Make them count.
Your family share your most precious childhood memories. Your best friends invested years in your friendship.
When we give our best energy to the world and expect our loved ones to survive on scraps, we're slowly eroding the very relationships that matter most. We're telling them that loving us means accepting less from us.
"Who is sitting at the front row of your funeral? Those are the people who truly matter in the world"
—Sahil Bloom
Save your best self for home.
The world can have what's left over.
