Sunday from the Porch
The Cost of Rehearsal
I told myself I had ten minutes.
Ten minutes to write about the work situation that had resurfaced in my head just before bed. The one I thought I’d already put down for the night. Ten minutes to get it out of my system. Ten minutes, and then I’d park it.
That’s not what happened.
Instead, I lay there for hours, replaying conversations that hadn’t occurred yet. Imagining how things would be said. Anticipating responses. Adjusting tone. Testing outcomes. It wasn’t dramatic or emotional in the way people usually describe sleepless nights. It was procedural. Methodical. Almost responsible.
Which is part of the problem.
I don’t often lose sleep to worry. When I do, it feels foreign enough that I start to question myself. But that night, the rehearsal had a rhythm to it. A strange sense of purpose. As if staying awake was doing something useful. Preparing me, protecting me, getting me ahead of whatever was coming next.
The next morning, I came across a line that stopped me cold: Stop rehearsing conversations that will never happen. The person you’re trying to convince. The outcome you’re chasing. The vindication you think you’re owed. None of it matters as much as what you do right now with what’s in front of you.
It wasn’t revelatory so much as accurate. Annoyingly accurate.
Because the truth is, I’ve gotten very good at rehearsing a life I’m not currently living.
I rehearse exits before I’ve fully arrived. I rehearse clarity before it’s been offered. I rehearse decisions as a way of soothing uncertainty. Mistaking mental motion for forward movement. It looks like strategy from the outside. It feels like diligence. But somewhere along the line, rehearsal crossed the line from preparation into avoidance.
Planning has a purpose. Rehearsal, I’m learning, has a cost.
The cost shows up quietly. In lost sleep. In a distracted morning. In the inability to enjoy neutral moments because my attention is already committed elsewhere. It shows up in how little space is left for new connections when so much energy is being spent managing imaginary futures. It shows up in the way I move through a day half-present, half elsewhere. Trying to outthink a timeline that hasn’t fully revealed itself yet.
This season has made the habit louder.
I’m in a city that still feels unfamiliar. I’m living in a temporary space that hasn’t quite settled into me. Work is stable enough to breathe, but not stable enough to stop scanning the horizon. Housing, finances, timing. None of it is in crisis, but all of it is unresolved. The kind of unresolved that invites constant mental check-ins, subtle vigilance, and the low-grade belief that if I just think hard enough, I can control the landing.
But control is not the same thing as care.
Somewhere along the way, rehearsal became a way of stepping out of my own life while telling myself I was being responsible. A way of living slightly ahead of myself instead of where my feet actually were. A way of postponing presence until conditions felt clearer.
The irony is that clarity rarely arrives that way.
It arrives in the day you actually live. In the conversations you allow to unfold instead of pre-writing. In the trust that you can respond when something is real, not just when it’s imagined.
Lately, I’ve been practicing something simpler. If not easier. I’m trying to stop rehearsing conversations that haven’t been requested. Stop narrating March while still standing in February. Stop borrowing stress from outcomes that don’t yet belong to me.
This doesn’t mean I’m avoiding hard decisions. It means I’m letting them come to me honestly. In context. In time.
I don’t need to know how this ends to live today well.
I just need to stop living everywhere else.