The Driveway

You know the moment.

Engine off. Hand on the door. Parked in your own driveway, and just… sitting there. You can see the lights on inside. You know who’s in there, what they need, what version of you they’re expecting to walk through the door. And you’re not ready to be that yet.

So you sit.

Maybe it’s five minutes. Maybe it’s ten. Maybe you’ve been doing it so long you don’t even notice anymore — it’s just part of coming home, like taking off your boots, like the way you always check the lock twice. A ritual with no name, because naming it would mean thinking about why you need it.

I’ve been in that driveway more times than I’d like to count.

There’s a version of it most men would call decompression — you tell yourself you’re just transitioning, leaving the work stuff at the door, which is true as far as it goes. But if you’re honest, it’s more than that. It’s the gap between who you had to be all day and who you actually are. Between the face that functions and the man underneath it.

All day, you’re something specific. Competent, reliable, in control, solving problems, making calls, carrying the weight of whatever it is you carry. You’re performing — not dishonestly, because you’re genuinely doing those things — but performing in the sense that there’s a role and you’re filling it, because that’s what the situation requires.

Then you pull into your own driveway and the performance is supposed to just stop. Switch off. You walk in and become the other thing — present, patient, available, all the things the people inside need you to be.

Some days you can do that seamlessly. Some days you just sit in the car.

What I’ve noticed is that the length of the driveway sit is a pretty accurate gauge of how close to the edge you actually are. A couple minutes? Fine. You’re just unwinding. Ten, fifteen, radio off, staring at nothing? Pay attention to that. That’s not decompression. That’s a man who’s been running on fumes for a while and doesn’t have enough left to fake it anymore, even for the people he loves.

The gap between who you have to be and who you are — that’s where a lot of men live their entire adult lives. Maintaining it is exhausting. And the cruel irony is that the people inside, the ones you’re holding it together for, would mostly rather have the real version. Even tired. Even honest. Even not okay.

They can’t know what you won’t tell them.

The driveway isn’t the problem. The driveway is just where the truth catches up to you for a few minutes before you decide what to do with it. Most nights you go inside and the gap closes back up, and that’s fine — that’s just life.

But if you’re in the driveway more than you’re present inside, that’s worth looking at. Not to make it a crisis, not to turn it into something bigger than it is — just to be honest with yourself about what it’s telling you.

The lights are on inside. The people in there are yours.

But you can’t give them what you don’t have. At some point, the driveway stops being a pause and starts being the place where you’re keeping everything you can’t afford to show anyone.

Figure out what to do with that before it becomes the only place you feel like yourself.