Nicole's Story: Showing Up When It's Inconvenient

Some people throw open their door because someone is at it.

Nicole has been throwing open hers for nineteen years, whether anyone is at it or not.

On this episode of Shut Up and Love Your Neighbor, our friend Nicole — an OG of this whole lifestyle long before there was a name on a t-shirt — sat down for a conversation about hospitality, proximity, and the unglamorous work of being available to people.

Nicole grew up watching her parents open their door for dinners. When her mom went to work, her best friend's mom made her breakfast every morning before school. Nobody planned it. Nobody put it on a calendar. The food was a Taylor ham, egg and cheese sandwich, and the kid eating it was Nicole.

That sandwich did something to her.

She has spent the rest of her life trying to be the woman on the other side of it.

A House You Walk Into Differently

Nicole and her husband have moved several times. Every move has involved a question most people don't ask when house hunting.

Not, "Is this our dream home?"

But, "How many people can we fit at the table?"

If a half-wall is in the way, how soon can it come down. Is there a porch. Is there a basement her parents could live in for a summer with a little autonomy. Could a friend passing through stay for a night, or a season.

She made a point worth sitting with — the phrase "dream home" is American shorthand we all use, but it almost always describes a space curated for the people who already live there. She and her husband have never approached a home that way. They walk in asking what it could do for everyone else.

Move Next to Your People

When they came back from a couple of years in Germany, they bought their current house sight unseen. A friend walked through it on FaceTime. They put in the offer.

It happened to be the house right next door to that friend.

They actually called the friend to ask if next door was too close — close enough that you can hear each other on the porch, wave at each other every time you step outside. The friend said it was great. They moved in.

Now another set of friends is moving onto the same street. Not from another state. From elsewhere in the same neighborhood. A few doors down, by choice, because they want a home they can host out of and they want to be near people who already do.

Nicole's read on this is direct.

When you're in the child-rearing years, especially, stop chasing more land and more space and more freedom if the price is community. Go where your people are. Go close enough to walk. Once seeing someone requires getting in the car, you stop seeing them.

That isn't a slogan. It's nineteen years of evidence.

When Nobody Else Has Seen It Modeled

It would be easy, hearing all of this, to assume Nicole has a magic neighborhood full of people wired exactly like her.

She doesn't.

She admitted that early on, when people didn't show up to things she invited them to, there was judgment in her heart. She had gone out on a limb. They were too busy. Too good for it. The story she told herself wasn't kind.

Time changed that.

What she learned over the years is that most people aren't declining community. They've never seen it. They don't have a model for it. They're underwater in their own lives and don't know there's a different way.

Dave shared a moment that landed in the same place. A neighbor who has helped his family more times than he can count recently told him, in the car, that he had never experienced this kind of street life — porch waves, potlucks, actually knowing the people next to you — until Dave and Candy started doing it. He said, plainly, that if they move next year, it will be a real loss.

The answer to that wasn't a guilt trip.

It was, "Now it's your turn. You've seen it. Go do it."

The Breakfast That Wasn't About Breakfast

The story that anchors the episode happened in a small-town hotel in Louisiana.

Nicole was there to lead a multi-day training. She is a facilitator for a living, which means her morning routine when she travels is non-negotiable — she has to fuel up, get her head right, walk into a room and bring energy for hours.

She came down to the hotel restaurant at 6:30 a.m. There was one other guest. There was no one at her table for ten minutes. She could hear the staff in the back and started feeling the irritation rise.

When the server finally came over, Nicole had her order locked, loaded, and ready to fire.

But something was off.

The woman was apologizing too much, for things that were not a big deal. There was a charge in the air around her. Nicole noticed it only because she has spent years training herself to look up and out instead of down at her own to-do list.

She softened her order.

She asked a question — she doesn't even remember what — that gave the woman a door.

The woman walked through it.

Her husband had died a couple of months ago. An overdose. She was working through her own sobriety while grieving him. She told Nicole how long she had been sober.

Nicole said congratulations.

Not "I'm sorry." She said that too. But mostly she said congratulations. For choosing today, when today seemed like an impossible choice. For fighting the hard fight. For staying in it.

That was the interaction. A few minutes. A breakfast that wasn't even particularly good.

But Nicole thought about the woman all day, through her sessions, while leading other people. That night she went back to her room, took the free pad of paper, wrote the woman a note — what she had seen in her, that the fight is worth it, that she's seen — and went to the front desk to find an envelope.

They didn't have one.

So she bought a postcard, just for the envelope, and wrote out the note again the next morning at breakfast. The woman wasn't working that day. A coworker promised to seal it and put it in her locker.

Nicole has no idea what happened next. She probably never will.

That's not the point of the story.

Empathy You Have to Earn

What Nicole said about all of this hit harder than the story itself.

She used to invite people to things and judge them when they didn't come, or didn't bring something, or showed up empty-handed. Now she's the one in a season where her capacity is tapped, and she shows up to friends' houses with nothing but herself, and tells them honestly that her presence is what she's bringing this time.

The grace she now extends to other people, she said, is grace she had to learn to receive first.

That woman at the hotel had something way bigger going on than the breakfast. So do most people, most of the time. The mom with the cup of sugar request. The neighbor who never RSVPs. The teammate who keeps canceling. The stranger taking too long to make eye contact.

We don't know.

We almost never know.

The shift, for Nicole, has been from defending her own time to recognizing that everyone is carrying a load — and her load isn't necessarily the heaviest one in the room.

What Shut Up and Love Your Neighbor Means to Her

At the end of every episode, we ask the same question.

Nicole's answer was short.

Show up.

Say yes when it's inconvenient. Get out of bed when the neighbor needs help with the TV. Take the table for ten minutes longer than you wanted to. Write the note. Buy the postcard. Move next door. Tear down the half wall.

Embrace inconvenience.

That's the whole thing.

Most of us are looking for a more complicated answer because a more complicated answer would let us off the hook a little longer. Nicole isn't offering one.

She's just been doing this for nineteen years.

This is her story.