Letters to Viv: The Bullshit Barometer

Learning to trust yourself is the most expensive education nobody warned you about.

Letters to Viv
Open, soul-packed letters to the kind of human I write for: the curious, creative, exhausted by the hustle, and craving something more. I’m writing to you (and me).

---

Dear Viv,

Something shifted in me over the past year and a half. I didn’t notice it happening. And then one day I did, and I couldn’t unsee it.

I’ve developed what I can only describe as an internal bullshit barometer. It goes off almost instantly now. A look. A tone. Something slightly off between what someone says and what their energy is actually doing. My body catches it before my brain has even finished processing the conversation.

I used to override that feeling. Constantly. I’d explain people away, give the benefit of the doubt, and stay quiet when something felt wrong. I had the emotional intelligence the whole time. I just hadn’t learned to trust it yet.

I trust myself now.

And Viv, there is something wildly liberating about that sentence.

In Mexico City

This second act feels less like reinvention and more like graduation. Like I survived the group project from hell and finally received the emotional degree I paid for in cortisol, tears, and several deeply questionable relationships.

Expensive education, really.

There’s a steadiness in me that didn’t exist before. I don’t feel the same pull toward emotionally chaotic dynamics I once did. I don’t feel the need to chase clarity from people who thrive in confusion. Something in me has stopped reaching for things that were never going to hold me properly.

And I’ve stopped calling it emotional availability, because I’ve realized that phrase doesn’t quite cover it.

Some people are emotionally available in the sense that they spray their feelings around like an unsecured hose pipe in a Krispy Kreme parking lot. Everyone gets soaked. Nobody asked for it. That’s not availability. That’s a weather event.

What I value now is emotional intelligence. The ability to communicate honestly, to regulate yourself, to take accountability without performing it, to handle a difficult conversation without emotionally detonating across the room like a gender reveal party gone wrong.

That’s the energy I want around me — in friendships, relationships, work, and family. Every part of my life.

This isn’t just about what I want from other people. It’s about who I’m becoming.

Emotional intelligence, I think, is knowing when something deserves your full presence and when silence is the most powerful response available. It’s recognizing when to stay and when to remove yourself from the table entirely, without needing anyone to understand why.

I look back at parts of my marriage now and I can see the moments my intuition was speaking. Small discomforts. Feelings I swallowed instead of explored. I sat in silence more than I spoke up, not from weakness but from the belief that keeping the peace was the same thing as keeping things together.

It isn’t.

My nervous system, meanwhile, was in the corner waving red flags like it was directing planes on a runway.

Emotional intelligence also means having the confidence to set a boundary without immediately apologizing for having one. That one took me longer than I’d like to admit.

Boundaries feel different now too, Viv.

They used to feel like something I had to justify, defend, soften at the edges so nobody felt too uncomfortable. Now they just feel like information. Here is what works for me. Here is where I stop. Clean and simple.

I don’t need everyone to understand. I don’t need to twist myself into emotional origami to fit inside spaces that were never built to hold me.

That version of me has graduated too.

These days I pay attention to how I feel after I leave a conversation. Whether I feel seen or just managed. The body always knows. I’m finally listening.

Learning to trust the thing that was trying to tell me the truth all along, even when I was doing everything I could not to hear it.

XO,

Tanya

---