I grew up adjusting. At my mother’s house: one set of rules, dynamics, expectations — an immigrant woman navigating a new country, making it work with what she had. At my father’s house: completely different — the dry drunk’s volatility, the specific tension of a household organized around managing someone’s unpredictability. Read the room. Change your approach. Adapt constantly.
That constant calibration became so normal I stopped noticing I was doing it. It was just how you moved through the world: read the environment, figure out what is required, become that.
Now the adjustment continues in a different form. Judy requires one kind of presence — patient, repetitive, not easily frustrated by the same question asked fifteen times. The grief for my father requires another — the ability to be sad and angry and complicated all at once. My mother, aging in Los Angeles, represents a third horizon: she’s not sick yet, not needing care yet, but the reality is approaching. Another adjustment coming.
Surgeon General Murthy’s loneliness research identified something relevant here: more than half of Americans report feeling that no one really knows them. The person who is always adjusting — always presenting the version that fits the current room — is profoundly knowable to everyone and known by no one. The adjustment is a form of isolation wearing the clothes of social competence.
Meditation is the only place I have ever practiced not adjusting. Not reading the room. Not calibrating to an audience. Just being present with whatever is actually there in me, without performing a version of it that will land better. That practice — of not adjusting for once — is what makes it possible to know yourself well enough to be known by someone else.
My father died. Judy lives with me. My mother is aging in Los Angeles. The adjustment continues. And in the middle of it, five minutes of not adjusting. That’s the anchor.
