POST 21: Needing Space — and Why I Had to Write a Pack About It

There are days when I don’t need advice, encouragement, or someone asking if I’m okay every ten minutes. I need space. Not because I’m angry, not because something terrible happened, not because I’m secretly upset and refusing to talk about it. I just need room to think.

Today was one of those days. But honestly, it’s been building for a while.

The last few days at work were relentless — a constant stream of requests, follow-ups, and the specific kind of exhaustion that comes from being needed by everyone simultaneously. I’d get home and shift straight into a different kind of needed: making sure Abby — my 15-year-old rescue cat who is currently not feeling her best — ate, giving her her medication, checking on the other pets so nobody felt abandoned, and fielding calls from my mother whose internet had been down for four days and who was, to put it gently, not handling it quietly. Every environment I walked into had something waiting for me. Every room had a request in it.

I have sarcoidosis, which means my energy isn’t unlimited on a good day. When you’re managing a chronic illness, your bandwidth is already smaller than most people realize. Interruptions don’t just break your focus — they cost you something you can’t always get back. So when I finally get a rare window to work on something I actually love, something I built from scratch and genuinely care about, that window feels precious in a way that’s hard to explain to someone who hasn’t spent months watching their energy disappear before noon.

Today was supposed to be that window. My boyfriend had work in the morning, the apartment was quiet, and I was locked in — updating the IHYH site, redoing images, uploading new packs. I was excited in the specific way I don’t get to be very often, because days like this don’t happen often. And then he came home, and the well-meaning bombardment continued.

I want to be clear: he wasn’t doing anything wrong. He cares. He worries. He wanted to spend time with me and make sure I was okay. The problem wasn’t that he cared — it was that I had finally found a rare pocket of uninterrupted focus, and I was protecting it like a dragon sitting on a pile of gold. Every question was reasonable. Every interruption came from a good place. My nervous system, however, had already filed for bankruptcy. 

Here’s what I’ve learned about needing space in a relationship: it’s not about the other person. It’s not a verdict on them or on us. It’s about having enough room inside your own head to actually exist without performing okayness for someone else’s comfort. And when you go from living alone — where space was just the default — to sharing your life with someone, that adjustment is real and nobody warns you about it properly.

So I did what any reasonable person would do. I channeled the frustration into three new packs. The rage had to go somewhere, and it wasn’t going to be fair to yell at someone for caring incorrectly when I could write about it instead. Needing Space practically wrote itself. Understanding Space came next — because I genuinely do understand where he’s coming from, even when it’s making me insane. And then the funny one arrived, which is what happens when you’ve explained yourself one too many times and your only remaining option is satire.

I also, for the record, made him buy the Understanding Space pack. I have no regrets.

Space is not rejection. Space is not punishment. Space is not a sign that something is wrong. Sometimes space is how we recharge, how we process, how we reconnect with parts of ourselves that get buried under work, responsibilities, caregiving, relationships, and everything else constantly demanding our attention. And sometimes space looks like accidentally spending an entire Saturday creating a pack about needing space instead of writing the blog post you planned to write about needing space.

Which, in hindsight, might have been the most accurate research possible.

If you’ve been craving a little room to breathe lately, you’re not alone. And if someone you love asks for space, it doesn’t always mean they’re pulling away — sometimes they’re just trying to hear themselves think.

If this resonated, I did what I usually do when life hands me a lesson: I turned it into a reflection pack. Or three. Needing Space, Understanding Space, and I Need an Hour Alone are now available in the IHYH shop. 

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