if a person was a house

When I try to picture someone’s inner space, I picture a house.

There are four things I notice: foundation, frame, lighting, and what they’re building towards.

grandmother’s house. shani 2023.

The Foundation

The foundation of a person is invisible, but you can sense how sturdy it is. Try sensing into it by asking: how resilient are they to stress and unpredictability?

Your foundation is your relationship to yourself. The strength of that relationship is the strength of your foundation. The problem with a shaky foundation is everything built on top of it feels like a game of jenga: the higher you build, the more likely one wrong move leads to collapse.

The strongest foundation you can have is one of acceptance and love. If you are able to sit with radical acceptance for all that you’ve done, all that you’ve been through, all that you feel and want, no matter how bent and embarrassing and ridiculous, you have a foundation other people cannot shake.

I didn’t see the value of this type of self-acceptance growing up, so I tried a few other things:

1. Self-indulgence: can be with food, sex, video games, shopping etc. Over time, a life centered around indulgence starts to feel like one long groundhog day. This relationship is fragile in the face of discomfort because it actively avoids consequences and accountability.

2. Self-hatred: can be a powerful fuel for action. But watching an intelligent, self-hating person navigate their life is like watching a corrupt country manage its oil reserves. They treat themselves like a resource to extract from, often overworking to the point of depletion. The natural wealth that should sustain them becomes a source of self-destruction.

Your intuition about someone’s foundation is your experience of their psychological resilience. If you are around someone who feels wobbly, you might sense that they have a limited capacity to be with you because they’re too worried about themselves. It might feel like you are responsible for keeping them steady.

The Frame

The frame of a house determines its shape. Everything else that follows: the windows and roof and walls, are limited and supported by the frame. Its there to provide structural integrity and hold the weight of everything else. In people, I see the frame as their beliefs and values.

I don’t like leaning into closeness without first observing a person’s relationship with their values. It is not about having the same ones as me. It’s the integrity of their frame that I care about: someone who lives by their beliefs often emanates a peace and self assuredness that makes leaning in feel intuitively safe. A sturdy frame means a house is not at risk of collapsing with a heavy gust of wind. Someone who frequently says one thing and does another feels flimsy, like their words and actions can’t carry much weight.

Every time you act in a way you believe in, you reinforce the beams that hold up your life. This is the visible part of self-love. You do this until your beliefs are load bearing— they will not just crumble under pressure. For example, something you might believe in is being a good partner. To live out this belief, you have to do all sorts of unglamorous things: to be honest when the truth might make someone leave, be reliable for the 6am airport drop-offs, be attentive to their needs and respectful of their boundaries. Lots of people would rather not do this. But doing them will create something unwavering inside of you.

Building the House

With a strong frame and foundation, it is more likely someone has clarity around what they should build. When I say build — you may think: career. But I mean it more broadly than that. Building is what we do every day: it is placing our attention somewhere, and letting it stack.

Building towards something is inescapable. The lonely hours, the empty hours, the hours spent on instagram and twitter and reddit: they all add up to something. If you deconstruct each activity in your day to examine how it trains the pathways of your awareness, what would it say about you? Are you accumulating restlessness or curiosity or devotion? In relationships, the thing I care about is how conscious someone is about what they are building over time.

I draw because I want to build a particular kind of attention. My favorite kind of attention is patient and precise. The kind of attention that can pass through a cheesecloth, extra-fine and permeable. I feel most connected to it when I am drawing things I can observe.

sketchbook page of tree.

Take a tree. To draw a tree, your eyes have to take in grooves in the bark, the negative space between branches, you have to notice how the light bends around the trunk, the shape of shadows, which side of the tree is the darkest. Sit down for 20 minutes and draw what you find striking. By drawing it, you notice things more deeply than you would if you took a picture or just admired it in passing. When I draw something, the primary goal is not to create something beautiful — it is to inhabit my favorite kind of attention.

There are so many ways to train your attention. Maybe you prefer bouldering, surfing, coding, singing, dancing, playing the cello. True skill in anything demands deep focus— attention sustained long after others have moved on. I think about this quote all the time.

Pick one thing and spend the rest of your life getting deeper into it.

Mastery is the best goal because the rich can't buy it, the impatient can't rush it, the privileged can't inherit it, and nobody can steal it. You can only earn it through hard work. Mastery is the ultimate status.

Derek Sivers

People who say AI will remove the importance of mastery miss something essential: striving towards beauty is its own reward. It makes your existence in the world deeper. You trust yourself more, your own discipline and steadfastness. You find that you hear more than others. You are more discerning and sensitive. You become someone different by practicing something daily for years.

I am dating someone who uses chess to train his patience. Instead of just making the most exotic move, he is training himself to be slower and deliberately think through future consequences. There is something sexy about being impulsive, and sometimes you are lucky enough to get away with it. But long-term success often looks more devotional and meticulous, less flamboyant. It looks like being willing to spend 2 weeks on the thing that most people have a 2 hour attention span for. Whatever you want to spend your life understanding, perfecting, returning to, over and over again, is what you should be building.

Lighting

I spent years only noticing energy.

The energetic flavor of a person is the electric current powering their house: is it bright, dim, steady, or erratic?

Energy is what creates a magnetic pull towards certain people. Walking into a room, it is not a thought that occurs in your head, but a felt sense in your body. There are energies that are more compatible with yours.

I am naturally attracted to people who are very bright: warm and inviting, their absence felt at every party they exit. I’ve learned the problem with allowing myself to look for brightness alone, is that it doesn’t account for the stable structures that allow for chemistry to remain healthy over time.

Someone can be dazzling and unforgettable. But without deliberate architecture to ground them, their energy will be directionless, spilling everywhere. It is hard to sustain closeness with people like this. They let their brightness do the heavy lifting: coasting through life on charisma, and neglecting the effortful things — a sturdy foundation, a commitment to their values, a focused practice. This may be okay for a while. But when times are hard, you’ll realize there is nothing to lean on, because they haven’t built anything enduring.

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Ending notes:

1. This piece is more a confession than a series of judgements. I see these things because they are also a part of me.

2. What does it feel like to inhabit your house? All you are doing is building a home you want to live in. And you have the rest of your life to make it into something you love.