Domestic Evidence

June 16, 2026

My house keeps telling on me.

I could claim I am a simple person, but there is a green couch sitting in front of a pink floral wall, so that argument may not survive cross-examination.

I could claim I do not like attention, but I have a buzzcut, tattoos, an art studio, and a mug from the Vancouver Art Gallery with a hummingbird on it. At some point, the evidence becomes difficult to manage.

I do think we wear our choices.

Not just in clothes, though obviously clothes are involved because I am still me and pretending otherwise would be dishonest and bad for morale.

We wear our choices in our bodies, in our homes, in our hair, in our skin, in what we buy, in what we repeat, and in what we keep reaching for without needing to explain it first.

A person can say they love simple things, and maybe they do. But then their house will usually tell you what kind of simple. Calm simple. Expensive simple. Beige simple. Nobody-lives-here simple. I-have-three-storage-baskets-called-solutions simple.

Mine is not doing that.

Mine is currently giving green, pink, flowers, art supplies, loud little objects, a cat somewhere judging the room, and tea in a mug I bought after looking at art. It is not quiet. It is not minimal. It is not trying to look like an adult made a spreadsheet first.

Which feels accurate.

I have spent enough of my life in environments where the official version mattered. Leadership had one. Bodybuilding had one. Motherhood had one. There were rooms where the correct version of me was supposed to arrive first, sit up straight, and not knock anything over emotionally.

I also grew up in a generation where following the institutional path was not really presented as optional. You were expected to build the respectable life, take the right roles seriously, and keep the stranger parts of yourself from making the meeting weird.

I did that for a long time.

Not perfectly, obviously. The evidence was always leaking.

But I understood the assignment.

The freedom of aging is that I no longer care about the assignment in the same way.

Or, more accurately, I actually do not give a fuck anymore.

The funny thing is that choices still leaked through. They always do.

It is the same as having little kids. You can think some choices are private, and then a five-year-old will stand in front of an entire classroom and provide testimony.

When Josh was in kindergarten, he had one of those little school prompts.

Favourite dinner: chicken.

Favourite thing to do: read.

Favourite drink: vodka.

So there we were. A full domestic disclosure package, released without consent, by a child with no media training.

That is life.

Disclosure without consent.

You can think the evidence is tucked away somewhere, but the house knows. The body knows. The children absolutely know, and unfortunately they are not bound by confidentiality.

I think I have been outed longer than my consent ever approved.

Not in the dramatic way. In the creative way. The outside-the-box way. The way I have moved through life, through rooms, through work, through fashion, through bodybuilding, through parenting, through everything.

I can look back now and see the tells were always there.

The strange eye.

The side door instead of the front entrance, because apparently I have never been a normal person with a clipboard.

The refusal to make the obvious choice just because it was available.

The need to solve problems from an angle no one put on the agenda.

The way I noticed what other people missed and then could not unsee it.

People may not know that my creativity was never only in the art.

It was in the way I approached almost everything.

I may not have called it art then, because apparently I required several decades and a basement studio to get the memo.

But it was.

Life kept disclosing it before I was ready to claim it.

Fitness taught me that in the bluntest way possible. People can say a lot about what they eat, how they train, how committed they are, what they “just can’t” do, what their body “just does.” And yes, bodies are complicated. Hormones, stress, age, sleep, disability, injury, life. All of that matters.

But patterns still leave evidence.

Training leaves evidence. Not training leaves evidence. Rest leaves evidence. Stress leaves evidence. The choices we repeat do eventually show up somewhere, sometimes with excellent lighting and sometimes in leggings that had no business being that honest.

I know that from bodybuilding. The stage version looked like one big polished moment, but the body was built through boring evidence. Meals packed. Sets repeated. Sleep protected. Training done when it was not cute. Nobody clapped because I packed my food. Nobody handed out trophies for being consistent on a random Wednesday.

But the body knew.

The body always knows.

I think homes know too.

A home collects the choices we make when we are not trying to convince anyone of anything. The mug we reach for. The colours we keep choosing. The chair we never sit in but somehow need. The blanket the dog steals. The art supplies that migrate even when they were absolutely put away yesterday. Allegedly.

Mine is starting to look less like a place I decorated and more like a place that finally stopped lying on my behalf.

It says I like colour. It says I like strange little things. It says I am not interested in disappearing politely into a neutral background. It says I want my life to feel like mine when I walk through it, not like I am renting space inside someone else’s idea of calm.

That feels new. Or maybe it is not new. Maybe I am just finally letting the through line show.

The retro pieces. The art. The fashion. The tattoos. The buzzcut. The loud room. The hummingbird mug. The five children. The bodybuilding history. The leadership years. The mothering. The weirdness. The softness. The edge. The art supplies slowly colonizing the nearest surface.

They are not separate files anymore.

They are all in the same room now, which explains the room.

For a long time, I think parts of my life knew how to behave in the correct room. Leadership could walk into leadership. Motherhood could walk into motherhood. Bodybuilding could walk onto the stage. Creativity could wait until later, which is a ridiculous arrangement, but somehow adulthood has managed to make ridiculous arrangements seem practical.

Now the rooms are merging.

The evidence is getting harder to separate.

It tells the truth before I do.