Sadie Speaks is my personal writing — short, honest essays from the deep middle of things. They started as emails to my list, but they’ve become something more: snapshots of truth, power, and self-return, written in real time.

🎧 Want to hear it how I meant it? Listen to me read it below.

💬 Prefer to read? Here’s the original text.

Last Monday, my husband Alex went back to the office. He’s been a federal employee for nearly a decade—working fully remotely for the last few years—and we’d known the shift was coming. We just didn’t know when, or where he’d be assigned.

We got nine days’ notice.

The good news? He’s on a compressed schedule—four tens—to cut down some of the drive time. The bad news? Those days are long. He’s out the door before the kids are up and drags his weary self back home just as I’m serving dinner. Then it’s a blur of bedtime and collapsing into bed himself, only to get up and do it all again. He’s lost six hours of personal time each week to the commute, and now it’s basically just me and the kids for four days straight.

The Sunday before he started back, our whole house was a mess of grief and anxiety. I was preemptively mourning the loss of connection with my partner and dreading the load of managing four kids and an entire household largely by myself. I expected to flounder. I thought the mornings would fall apart without his help, that I’d lose momentum in my work now that I have to be home for the afternoon bus, that our marriage would start to strain under the weight of less time and fewer emotional spoons.

But when the house emptied out that first morning—Alex at his new office, kids at school—something opened up in me.

For the first time since having children, I had real space. I was alone. Not for a quick errand or an hour in between things—truly, uninterruptedly alone. I didn’t have to give a hug in the middle of a task, eat when someone else was ready, or even close the bathroom door. I didn’t have to sync to anyone else’s rhythm. I got to make my own. 

It was entirely disorienting – and absolutely gorgeous.

So I did weird stuff. Had full conversations with my dog. Sang dumb songs that I’d be mortified to belt out in front of other humans. Ate random snacks when I felt like it instead of breaking for lunch midday. I gave myself permission to do whatever I wanted—and it felt like the culmination of everything I’ve been working toward: resting in my power. 

Letting slowness lead. Letting creativity emerge without obligation. Trusting that doing things differently—more present, less performative—isn’t laziness. It’s just the feminine way of being. And I am finally, finally learning to trust it. 

The week worked. Mornings ran smoother without him. I tackled months-old clutter. Business ideas sparked. My motivation to cook returned. Everything felt…aligned. And I thought: This is the payoff. This is what I’ve been shifting toward.This is what it looks like when I stop leaking energy and start living intentionally. 

And then Thursday came.

Alex walked in the door after a long week—disillusioned and sitck-a-fork-in-him done. I, alternatively, was lit up and ready to reconnect. “Let’s make dinner,” I said. “Let’s hang out. I missed you.” But he couldn’t meet me there. He wasn’t mean. Just unavailable. Still tangled in his own overwhelm of work stress, family responsibilities (that should now happen when, exactly?), and no time to breathe.

Still, it hit me sideways. I felt sad. Then rejected. Then grumpy as hell. We ended up having a nice evening—we talked, traded foot rubs, curled up in our underwear watching Frasier reruns—but the funk didn’t lift. It wasn’t until I was getting in bed that I was able to name it: anxiety. But it was a confusing variety, because I couldn’t place the origin. So I went to sleep. I figured I was probably just tired.

But the next morning it was worse. I woke up agitated and just plain pissed off. So I sat with it (coffee in hand)…until I realized what had happened: I’d taken in his discomfort. AndI wasn’t managing my own energy anymore. I was trying to manage his.

That realization stunned me. Because we’ve done the work— years of therapy, and real change. I thought we were past this. But here it was: an old tap I hadn’t sealed. Leaking power.

Even in relationships you’ve worked hard to repair—even in the healthiest dynamics—your power can still drain through old pipes. Because codependency isn’t always dramatic. Sometimes it looks likes this:

💧 You can’t enjoy your coffee because your husband is mad he can’t find matching socks—so you go into fix-it mode instead of staying in your own moment.

💧 You hold off on serving dinner because your chronically-late MIL isn’t there yet—so everyone else sits hungry while you wait.

💧 You stop singing in the car because your preteen groans—so you shrink your joy to avoid her reaction.

💧 You share a bold idea with someone you trust, and they shoot it down—so you pretend it was just silly, that it didn’t matter. Even though it did.

These are micro-leaks. The subtle ways we give away our power without realizing it. And they almost always share one thing in common: Your joy starts to feel dangerous.

Why? Because we’ve been taught that it’s morally wrong to feel good when someone else feels bad. That when others are in pain, the right thing to do is dim ourselves in solidarity. So when someone can’t access what we’re feeling, they orbit us – trying to siphon what they can’t source. Not because they’re malicious. Because they’re dysregulated and they don’t have the awareness—or tools—to shift that for themselves. 

This is the sneaky side of codependency. Not the obvious, over-functioning kind we all know about. The subtle kind. The kind where your joy feels suspicious because someone else is struggling. The kind where your nervous system picks up someone else’s signal and starts trying to solve it, even if they haven’t asked you to. The kind that feels like love…but doesn’t actually help. It doesn’t move the system forward. Because it’s not a circuit. It’s a drain.

Here’s the truth we haven’t been taught: Human bodies can’t heal emotional states for others. No matter how much we want to. But the instinct to try? It comes from care. We mirror pain because we think it proves we care. Because we’ve been taught that joining someone in their dark is the way to show love. But matching without grounding doesn’t heal. It amplifies.

What actually helps is modeling a different frequency. Staying grounded in your own energy. Not jumping in the pit of despair with them. Instead: Drinking your coffee while it’s hot. Singing even when your kid rolls their eyes. Eating when the dinner is ready—without waiting for the time-blind straggler to catch up. This is nervous system leadership—and it’s exactly howcoregulation actually works. (And, spoiler: it’s literally what I do in Reiki.)

Last Friday, when I realized what I was doing—when I stopped trying to fix Alex’s feelings and got back into my own lane—the anxiety vanished. Like flipping a switch. Like my body exhaled and said, thank you for stepping back from this impossible task.

Power leaks are usually like that: quiet, subtle, and totally solvable. They’re hard to spot, though, because they’re underground. They don’t rupture; they simply seep. Water’s still coming out of the hose, so you tell yourself it’s fine…there’s just less pressure. So you squeeze the trigger harder and then wonder why you’re so tired. This is what an energetic leak feels like. The hose is cracked under the driveway, and you don’t even know you’re losing water.

But once you name it, it can’t keep draining you. Once you hear the hiss, you know where to dig. And once you find the crack, you can’t unsee the water it steals—or the parts of yourself it asks you to abandon just to keep the flow going.

Reclaiming your power isn’t a one-time declaration. It’s an ongoing, evolving, situational practice. You have to face the same dynamic again and again…but if you’re paying attention, you’ll start meeting it differently. Each time with more awareness. More grounding. More discernment. And that moment when you notice what you couldn’t see before isn’t failure—it’s growth.

You can’t rest in your power if it’s still leaking. You can’t water the garden of your life if the hose is cracked under the driveway. And you sure as hell can’t bloom when your roots are shriveling from drought.

So this week—take two of Alex’s new four-day work marathon— I’m not trying to fix anything except my own leaks. And I’m asking you: Where are yours? Where does your joy start to feel dangerous? Who’s in the room when you shrink?

That’s where your tap is open. Next time, we’ll talk about how to shut it off.