Honestly, Sandie

Creative inspiration note: This post was written with a wink toward Good as Hell by Lizzo. No liberties taken, just borrowing a little “fix your crown and stop carrying everybody else” energy. If you listen while reading, consider this your reminder that not every emotional emergency deserves your unpaid labor.

THE LITTLE GREEN BOX (aka auto)

A friend of mine and I sometimes start our phone calls by hitting record.

Not because we are organized and certainly not because we have sponsors, a business plan, or matching microphones. (I mean… I have those matching mics, in an closest, where they live now after we did record one episode that I have yet to edit, upload and have the guts to share with the world.) We do it because somewhere deep in our souls we are convinced we are one mildly traumatic life event away from becoming the kind of women who accidentally start a really good podcast. The kind where women laugh, cry, feel exposed, feel seen, and occasionally whisper, “Wait… are we okay?”

A “quick check-in” between us never lasts less than an hour.

We begin with normal things. Kids. Work. Marriage. Grocery store complaints. Pets. Amazing husbands…. Of course! Then suddenly we are deep into fight or flight, nervous systems, husbands coping through suspicious amounts of video games (us playing not just them) whether survival mode quietly steals years from your life, daughters becoming women, healing, purpose, and the strange moment in adulthood where you realize you are no longer drowning but somehow still treading water out of habit.

One of us says something smart. The other says, “Wait, hold on,” like we are co-hosting something important. Then one of us inevitably ends up unintentionally therapizing the other while simultaneously folding laundry or walking around the house after a day at work.

Women are unbelievable.

Truly. The emotional range alone deserves funding.

After one of these calls recently, I sat there staring into space, curling iron still warm, and had a realization that felt both clarifying and deeply annoying:

I think I accidentally appointed myself Director of Vibes.

No meeting.

No orientation.

No paycheck.

Just vibes.

The thing about being a photographer is that you stop seeing the world the way other people do. You notice tiny shifts. Somebody turns slightly away from the light. Someone smiles but not with their eyes. A room changes energy and you feel it before anyone says a word. You begin understanding exposure, balance, shadow, timing. You learn that one tiny adjustment changes the whole image.

Apparently, at some point, I stopped limiting that skill to cameras.

My sister and I have this running joke from photo shoots that explains it perfectly.

She has a fantastic eye. Truly. She sees moments beautifully. She frames things naturally and catches emotion in ways that feel effortless. What she does not love is manual settings.

One day we moved from shooting indoors to outside, and the sunlight hit us like personal disrespect. Bright, aggressive, middle-of-summer sunlight. The kind that makes you feel like the universe turned every setting up to eleven just to humble you. Everything instantly blew out. My sister looked at me completely panicked, camera in hand, like she had somehow personally failed photography itself.

“What do I DO?”

Without even thinking, I yelled back:

“The green box! The green box!”

Canon girls know.

The little green box means auto. Stop touching everything. Stop manually compensating for conditions you are not emotionally prepared to handle. Let the camera help you before you spiral into an existential crisis in direct sunlight.

We laughed so hard that day it became a thing between us. Now, whenever one of us is overthinking, emotionally buffering an entire room, trying to fix twelve moving parts at once, or generally behaving like unpaid management for other people’s chaos, somebody eventually says:

“Girl. The green box.”

Translation:

Respectfully.

You are doing too much.

The humiliating part is realizing I think I have been emotionally living life in manual mode for years. Walking into rooms and instantly adjusting for everyone else’s exposure. Who feels left out? Who seems sad? Who is overwhelmed but pretending not to be? Who is spiraling? Who is quietly falling apart while still making potato salad for the potluck and answering texts with exclamation points?

Women know.

We become emotional detectives without even realizing it.

Part instinct.

Part survival.

Part love.

Part whatever strange social contract convinced us we should somehow care deeply, stay beautiful, regulate everybody’s feelings, remember birthdays, notice tension, plan snacks, remain emotionally available, and still somehow toss our hair, check our nails, and look good as hell while doing it.

I wish I could say this started in adulthood, but if I am honest with myself, I think I was trained into it little by little. Years ago, I sat through leadership meetings scribbling notes while phrases floated around dressed up as wisdom: “Nothing is about you.” “Always control your attitude.” “You don’t have a right to be moody.” “My love for people is outgrowing my love for myself.”

At the time, I wrote it all down like someone handing me cheat codes for becoming a better woman. Kinder. Stronger. More mature. More useful. More loving. More dependable.

No one in those rooms was trying to destroy anybody. I really believe that.

But somewhere along the way, the math got weird.

I quietly started believing that love meant management. That maturity meant emotional control. That if someone near me felt disconnected, lonely, overwhelmed, disappointed, exhausted, unseen, or quietly unwell, maybe it was my job to adjust the lighting.

No wonder I became Director of Vibes.

No wonder somebody casually saying, “Things have been hard lately,” activates something primal inside me where suddenly I have perspective, encouragement, solutions, a healing plan, emotional support options, and at minimum a strongly worded recommendation to take a girls’ trip and drink something overpriced near water.

Because here is the thing I am slowly learning at forty-four: sometimes people are not asking to be rescued.

Sometimes they are telling the truth.

Sometimes support sounds like wisdom. Sometimes it sounds like showing up. Sometimes it sounds like, “Wow… that sounds really hard,” and then staying in the room long enough to let silence breathe instead of immediately reorganizing somebody else’s emotional furniture.

That one has been hard for me.

Because helping feels good. Caring feels good. Showing up feels good. Women are incredible at carrying things.

Sometimes too incredible. Sometimes so incredible that we quietly disappear inside the labor of making sure everybody else survives.

And babe…You deserve to feel good as hell too.

Lately, when I catch myself mentally reorganizing everybody else’s emotions while forgetting I am also a person standing in the room, I hear myself yelling across that chaotic photo shoot:

“The green box!” The reminder that not every shadow needs my adjustment. Not every hard thing belongs to me. Not every emotion in the room requires my management.

YESSSS. That’s the ending.

Because the emotional thesis is not:

stop caring.

It’s:

stop over-editing life.

Stop fixing the frame before it even exists.

Stop living in post-production.

The power is:

just be in the damn picture.

Sometimes grown adults are allowed to experience their own lighting conditions.

That sentence alone feels mildly offensive to the version of me who spent years believing love meant intervention.

Because if someone was hurting, I helped. If someone felt unseen, I noticed. If someone was overwhelmed, I stepped in. If somebody’s world felt shaky, I quietly tried to steady it, even if my own hands were already full.

That sounds noble until you realize how exhausting it is to spend your life exposure compensating for people who never asked you to touch the camera.

At some point, caring quietly became managing. And managing quietly became identity.

The exhausting part about being a woman is how quickly we confuse usefulness with love. We become so good at holding things together that eventually nobody notices we are tired, including us. We tell ourselves we are strong, dependable, nurturing, mature. Meanwhile, half the time we are just emotionally overextended women trying to manually adjust every setting while pretending we are totally fine.

I am learning, slowly and somewhat against my will, is this:

Not every shadow needs my adjustment.

Not every silence requires my interpretation.

Not every hard thing belongs to me.

Not every person is asking to be rescued.

Sometimes people need space to sit in their own discomfort long enough to hear themselves think. Sometimes life teaches things I cannot explain, organize, soften, or lovingly over-function my way around.

And sometimes, the strongest thing a woman can do is stop touching the settings.

Not because she stopped loving.

Because she finally remembered she is allowed to exist in the frame too.

Allowed to stop fixing.

Allowed to stop editing.

Allowed to stop trying to exposure compensate for every difficult thing before it even develops.

Sometimes the wisest thing you can do is trust the moment, hit record, put the camera on auto, and let yourself simply be.

The green box.

Girl.

Respectfully.

You do not have to manually save every picture.