Rent-Free Living

Anne Helen Petersen had the most perfect sentence in her newsletter: “There are people you encounter, however briefly, and end up living rent-free in your head for years.”

I do not know the people who are living rent-free in her head (a set of influencer twins), but I know the ones that occupy my own mental space. They are always people I know—almost always people I know very well—and I give them a rent-free room in my brain so I can stress-think about them, wasting energy.

I have silent conversations with them, explaining why they are so. damn. wrong.

Seeing it written that way by Petersen—that I’m giving them rent-free space vs. gaining something from the energy expended—was such a profound shift for me. From now on, when I start telling them that they can hang out and not pay a dime, I’m going to backtrack and tell them that if they want to occupy that space, I need to be getting something out of the exchange, too.

It’s my brain, after all.