There's a stretch of Sunset near Echo Park where the light does something specific in the early mornings. Soft, golden, the kind that makes you slow down even when you're running late. I caught myself there this week, stopped at a red light that felt longer than it needed to be, watching a couple on the sidewalk. They weren't arguing — just one of them talking, animated, clearly working through something. The other one just stood there. Listening. Not nodding. Not offering solutions. Just — there.
The light turned green. I kept thinking about it the rest of the drive.
I've spent most of my life believing that love required action. That if someone I cared about was hurting, my job was to fix it. To solve it. To make the hurt smaller through sheer effort. That's what I learned early — not from cruelty, but from silence. When emotions didn't get space to exist, I learned to manage them instead. Control them. Redirect them into something useful.
It took me a long time to understand that sometimes love just asks you to stay.
I've been sitting with that lately. Not because I've figured it out — because I keep getting it wrong in new ways. Someone I love was going through something heavy this week. My instinct kicked in immediately: how can I help, what can I do, what do you need from me. All the right questions on the surface. All the wrong energy underneath.
Because what they needed wasn't my help. They needed me to stop trying to make it smaller. To sit with them inside the heaviness without treating it like a problem that needed solving.
That's harder than it sounds.
Session 3 of the work I built into Dig Deep is about this — about the vacuum we create when we try to control outcomes instead of sitting with process. I caught myself in that vacuum this week. Not because I'm heartless. Because I care too much in the wrong direction. Because my nervous system still reads discomfort as something to eliminate rather than something to witness.
I'm learning — slowly, imperfectly — that presence doesn't always mean having answers. Sometimes it just means not leaving. Not trying to speed up someone else's timeline. Not needing them to feel better so I can feel useful.
There's a version of masculinity I inherited that believed love was measured by what you could provide. Resources. Solutions. Stability. All real things. All insufficient on their own. Because what gets left out of that equation is the question nobody taught me to ask: can you stay with someone when they're falling apart, without needing them to pull it together for your comfort?
I'm still learning how to do that.
I think about Edwidge Danticat sometimes — the way her characters hold grief without performing it. The way she writes people sitting with pain that doesn't get resolved by the end of the chapter. That kind of witnessing feels almost radical in a culture that wants everything tied up, lessons extracted, growth visible.
Real love doesn't always give you that.
Sometimes it just asks you to be in the room.
I'm writing this from LA, but my mind keeps going back to Brooklyn. To the specific way people used to sit on stoops and not say much. Just be together. I took that for granted as a kid. Thought silence meant absence. Now I understand it was its own kind of care — the refusal to fill space just because it felt heavy.
That couple on Sunset this morning — I don't know what they were working through. But what stayed with me was the ease of the one who was just listening. No urgency. No visible effort to redirect. Just — I'm here. However long this takes.
That's the thing I'm trying to practice now. Not because I've arrived at some enlightened place. Because I keep noticing how often I reach for control when what's actually being asked of me is trust. Trust that the person I love knows what they need. Trust that my presence matters even when I'm not doing anything measurable with it.
I don't know if I'm getting better at this yet. Some days it feels like progress. Other days I catch myself mid-sentence trying to fix something that wasn't broken — just heavy. And I have to stop. Breathe. Remember that love doesn't always require my hands on it.
Sometimes it just requires me to stay in the room.
If any of this sits with you — if you're learning the same thing, or trying to — the work that helped me get here is at the Gregory Mitchell Experience. It's not answers. Just frameworks for sitting with what's real.