Healing or Hiding?

on isolation, protection, and knowing the difference

I was sitting in the Chick-fil-A drive-through a few days ago — 8-count nuggets, fries, Diet Coke — not exactly what the SHA Wellness doctors ordered, but some days a girl has to do what a girl has to do.

The line wasn’t moving. So I looked through the window.

And something stopped me.

Inside, teenagers were everywhere. Taking orders, flipping things, calling out names, bumping into each other, laughing at something I couldn’t hear. A girl at the window caught eyes with a cook and they both cracked up over some private joke. A kid in the back was doing something unnecessarily dramatic with a bag of ice.

It was completely ordinary. And I could not look away.

I sat there longer than I needed to, even after the line moved. Something in my chest had gone very quiet. I couldn’t name it immediately.

Then I could.

I was envious. Of the teenagers. In the Chick-fil-A.

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My first real job was at a place called The Inside Scoop — an ice cream shop in Martinsville, Indiana, independently owned by one of our teachers and a local baseball commissioner. The literal Small Town a few miles over from the one John Mellancamp sang about. The kind of place where people actually knew each other’s names.

Every weekend, the sports teams would pile in after their games, sunburned and loud and victorious or defeated, and we’d serve them. They’d be so happy because it’s ice cream — what’s not to love? I learned to perfect the swirl cone. I learned to make a malt. I learned how to close up a shop at the end of a long shift with your friends and feel, in some wordless way, like you had done something.

I have a photo from that summer in 1990 (working on locating it!) Me and some friends, criminally tan from the tanning bed (a different era, we know, we know), clearly five pounds heavier from quality-testing every flavor on the menu. We look completely unself-conscious. We look like teens who have nowhere better to be.

How apropos, by the way, that my first job was called The Inside Scoop and I would spend the next thirty years in journalism. The universe has always been sending me a wink and a smile.

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Here is what I think happened to us — not just to me, but to a lot of us.

We got very efficient. Very optimized. Very flexible. We got the freedom we said we wanted, and we took it, and we retreated into our separate little rectangles — our screens, our home offices, our carefully curated solo workflows. We went from rooms full of people to Brady Bunch grids on Zoom. We traded the ambient electricity of other humans for the clean, quiet control of working alone. In our own precious little psilo.

And I’m not here to say it’s all bad. It isn’t. There is real beauty in autonomy. I know this firsthand after leaving the network tv job and transitioning into the freedom that independent media provides.

But something got lost in the trade, and I think we’re only just beginning to admit it.

What got lost was frequency. The actual, physical, crackling energy that only exists when you’re in a room with other people working toward something together. One person’s half-formed idea catches a spark from someone else’s offhand comment and suddenly there’s something in the air that didn’t exist sixty seconds ago. You cannot manufacture that on a video call. You cannot schedule it. It just happens, or it doesn’t, and it only happens in proximity.

What got lost was the finish line. The thing you could hold, or air, or point to at the end of the day. Here’s what we made. Here’s what we did. See it? When I was on television — twenty-some years, hosting, reporting, showing up — every single day ended with a show. A real, actual, measurable thing we made together. Producers, editors, writers, stage managers, lighting guys, audio grips, all of us pulling toward the same moment. When it was good, you felt it in the room. That feeling was a drug, and I did not understand how much I was going to miss it.

What got lost was the accident of other people. The way someone else’s presence interrupts your own patterns. Pulls you out of your head. Makes you laugh at something you didn’t expect. Reminds you that you are not the only person on earth with a mind and a theory and a particular take on things.

We need to be interrupted. We need to be surprised. We need other people’s energy to ignite something in us that we simply cannot reach alone.

The teenagers in the Chick-fil-A had it. They had all of it. And they had no idea.

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I want to be careful here, because the chapter I’ve been living in — the one on my fifty acres in the Santa Monica Mountains, what I affectionately call the island — that chapter was not a mistake.

It was required.

I needed the quiet. I needed the land and the birds and the long mornings and the space to write and think and feel things I had been outrunning for years. The healing that happened in that stillness was real and it was hard-won and I would not trade a single slow afternoon of it.

Little Gem Ranch: a sanctuary, no doubt.

But here is what nobody tells you about choosing to retreat: at some point, if you’re not paying attention, the thing that was protecting you becomes the thing that is containing you. The island stops being a sanctuary and starts being a story you tell yourself about why you’re not ready yet.

Safety can masquerade as wisdom. Stillness can masquerade as peace. I know the difference now, because I can feel it — the difference between I need this and I’m afraid.

I’m not afraid anymore. Or maybe I am, and I’m going in anyway.

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The stars, for what it’s worth, agree.

We’re in the year of the Fire Horse. The Strawberry Moon is rising in June, and for Virgo, the message couldn’t be louder: go. Not someday. Now. Out of the gate, full speed, back in the room.

I’m not someone who outsources my decisions to the cosmos, but I do believe in confirmation. And when what you feel in your body lines up with what’s written in the sky, you pay attention.

Something is opening. I can feel it before I can see it.

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I don’t know exactly what form it takes yet. Maybe a new podcast. Maybe something I haven’t imagined. Maybe it’s simpler than that — more walks with new friends, more wellness retreats, a yes to the meeting I might have talked myself out of last year.

What I know is this: I am saying yes to more rooms. More people. More friction, more electricity, more of the beautiful mess of collaboration. More chances for the accident of someone else’s idea to collide with mine in a way neither of us planned.

And for the women reading this who know exactly what I’m talking about — who have been healing, or hiding, or both, who have been so careful and so self-protective that they’ve accidentally made themselves very, very small — I want to say:

The island was good. It served you. You can leave now.

You don’t have to know what comes next. You just have to open the door.

The swirl cone isn’t going to perfect itself. In other words, we’re back, bitches!

Now I want to hear from you.

• When’s the last time you were in a room working toward something with other people? What did that feel like in your body?

• Is there an “island” in your life right now? Be honest: is it healing you, or is it hiding you?

• What’s one thing you’ve said no to lately that you told yourself was self-care, but might actually have been fear?

• If you let yourself be seen again in a big way this year, what would that even look like?

• What’s your version of the swirl cone — the simple, collaborative, hands-on thing you miss making with other people?

• What would it cost you to say yes to one more coffee, one more walk, one more invitation this month?

• Tell me in the comments: where are you on this spectrum right now? Healing in your cocoon, or hiding in it?

With love from the ranch,

Catt