Chapter 13: I Am Scaffolding

how to stop engineering the outcome, san vicente bungalows, and of course scaffolding

This week I realized that I am scaffolding.

Yes. The horrible metal poles and covered sidewalks that protrude from the most stunning hundred-year-old New York buildings. The structures that make you duck your head, reroute your path, question whether the building is crumbling behind the tarp.

But sometimes they block the rain. Sometimes they stop the sun.

That’s me right now. Not the finished façade. The reinforcement New Yorkers roll their eyes at and pray will be gone by spring.

A couple weeks ago, on the eve of the Chinese New Year, which I suddenly knew a lot about because the algorithm decided I should, I was sitting on my couch unbathed, eating chicken satay out of a cardboard container when I learned that showering before midnight could rinse away your abundance.

A woman on my feed explained, very calmly, that if you washed your hair you could literally cleanse your incoming wealth down the pipes.

I looked at my bathtub.
I looked at my skin.
I considered the stakes.

Maybe soaking is different. Maybe soaking allows abundance to marinate.

So I just didn’t wash my hair.

This is what my brain does when left alone with a future. Everything becomes a lever.

Cynthia told me this week that I’ve been forcing things my entire life. Forcing relationships. Forcing timelines. Forcing versions of myself to emerge before they were ready.

“That’s not how things work,” she said, like someone explaining gravity.

The forcing always felt productive. Heroic, even. If I just push hard enough, this will work. If I optimize the timing, I’ll arrive faster.

Now she wants me to move differently.

Not: How do I secure this?
Not: How do I make him choose me?
Not: How do I get to the end?

Lay the foundation. Then stop interfering.

Which, for me, looks like not sending the second text. Not following up on a job five times in one afternoon. Not refreshing the thread. Not assuming silence means everyone secretly hates me.

I don’t know how to stop interfering with life. Waiting feels like decay.

So on Friday, I tried an experiment.

I went to San Vicente Bungalows — the place that makes you put a sticker over your phone camera so you physically cannot document your own existence — wore something slutty but appropriately stylish, ordered a martini, and decided I would not manage the night.

I stayed with my friends. I ate zucchini chips. I let my shoulders drop.

Someone who has hovered in my orbit came over. We talked. He went back to his friends.

There was a version of me who would have drifted over, inserted herself into the group, engineered another ten minutes, an hour etc.

I stayed seated.

It was barely visible.

But for me, it was seismic.

Cynthia also said something that lodged itself under my rib cage:

“Your subconscious is using your free will to say no to what your conscious mind wants.”

I can consciously want peace while subconsciously remaining loyal to chaos because chaos feels like home. I can consciously want someone steady while still being magnetized by the one who withholds.

Starting something new again has always felt humiliating to me. Like admitting I miscalculated.

But scaffolding isn’t demolition. It’s reinforcement.

You can’t tell it’s protecting something beautiful. It just looks like an inconvenience. A why are you here?

Last week in the middle of the night, I hallucinated a spider the size of a cereal bowl in my bedroom. I stared at it for ten seconds. It didn’t move.

Instead of nudging someone beside me, there was no one to nudge, I opened my laptop.

“There is a life-sized daddy longlegs crawling on my window?” I typed.

My resident AI exterminator responded: “A cereal bowl–sized daddy longlegs in a New York apartment is unheard of.”

The last time this happened in my old apartment, I made a guy come over and throw a shoe at it. It was a mark on the wall.

The reflex I dislike most in myself is the one that whispers: You need someone to save you.

Which is absurd. I have survived every single thing that has happened to me. Objectively, I am competent.

And yet there is still that murmur.

The scaffolding, I think, is the space between those two voices. The part of me that reaches for rescue and the part that knows I can stand still on my own.

Because this is the real pattern:

I step forward and then I pull back.

I host one How to Function event and disappear.
I post four things on Instagram and decide I’m awful.
I get close to someone and then mentally step outside the moment.
I move toward visibility and retreat before anyone can fully see me.

It’s subtle. No one calls you out for it. But I notice.

So here’s the experiment:

What happens if I don’t pull back?

If I post for eight weeks straight as myself and see what happens.
If I don’t delete it.
If I don’t vanish after.
If I let the tarp flap in the wind and don’t apologize for it not being cute yet.

No dramatic relaunch. No “new era.” No savior arriving to steady the beams.

Just repetition.
Just staying.

I’m in the construction zone. I might be here for a minute. And like most construction in New York, it will probably take longer than the original estimate.

Somehow, functioning,
Jilly