On Clear Signals

This morning with a full house, kids running around, dogs being their honest mammal selves, Z doing Z things, all the usual chaos that makes the day feel like a day — I’m cooking, regulating one kid while answering the other, side-eyeing the dogs as they speak in posture and breath, thinking about my estranged 20-year-old stepson and his permanent silence… and suddenly something clicks.

”Everything alive in this house gives me clean signals.”

I’ve curated my environment — almost unknowingly — by setting up boundaries that protect my becoming.I’ve built a life around beings and contexts that give me clean signal. It’s the effortful thing to do, no?

If you don’t know what a clean signal is:

To me, a clean signal is any communication — words, gestures, posture, sounds, movement, touch, whatever — where both bodies just go, “Yeah, I get you.” No decoding. No guessing. No emotional gymnastics.

The 2-year-old is instinct incarnate. Pure raw signal. My 5-year-old is sincerity with legs — chaotic but real AF. When she feels safe, she’s open. When she doesn’t, she closes up. Both are clean. Both are consistent. The dogs? Walking truth. Breath, weight, micro-movements, no story, no narrative, no hidden agenda. If there’s food, there’s no politics — just honest dominance hierarchies like nature intended. My girlfriend meets me where I am; I meet her where she is. No performance. No pretending.

So it’s as if I’m not becoming healthier just because I’m doing the inner work (I am, but that’s not the point) and I’m becoming healthier because the environment is honest enough that my real nature shows up without armor. An environemnt with clear signals lets my nervous system heal(?). There’s a loop, simple and undeniable for me:

clean signal → clean response → real connection

Now I can see how far that loop has spread through every corner of my life.

Dating felt off because the signals were muddy. Friendships collapsed because the signals contradicted themselves. I’ve walked away from jobs, partnerships, invitations — not out of drama, but out of clarity. Out of an exhausted nervous system refusing to spend one more unit of energy decoding other people’s confusion.

Ambiguity now feels like someone else making their confusion my job. And my body says no before my mouth even knows why. Maybe that’s bias. Maybe trauma. Maybe wisdom. Probably all three. But patterns don’t lie: clean signals land differently. They hit the body with that “I can breathe here” energy.

Then on top of everything I thought about most adults I interact with — the chronic half-signal people. The ones who want access to you, not presence with you. The ones who freeze you in an old version of yourself because updating their internal file is too expensive. The ones who wrap everything in politeness and avoidance. Peacekeeping? Cowardice? Habit? Who the fuck knows.

I do know that once you start respecting yourself, you lose the ability to translate for people. Something in the body shuts the door before the empathy scripts even load.

There’s a strange beauty in no longer shrinking or bending or explaining. You stop negotiating with silence and stop offering clarity to people who treat clarity as confrontation. You stop contorting your emotional availability around someone else’s inability to show up. That’s no longer viable or sustainable for the quality of life we want.

It’s energy conservation.

I think most unclear relationships don’t even explode — they fade like bad reception or static. One day you look at your phone and realize you haven’t heard from them in months… and your life didn’t change at all. It’s energy conserved.

Like my main phone number. Which had (has?) a call-forwarding broken for four months and I never noticed. I only realized because a cousin confronted me. I apologized, explained, gave him the correct number. He never used it. Judgment? Curiosity? Gossip? A drive-by vulnerability check? No fucking clue. Still love you, primo.

But my body filed that interaction under “unclear,” and that’s enough for me now. Ambiguity is expensive. Confusion drains the parts of me I’ve spent years rebuilding. From this point forward, it’s clean and clear signals because the bar lives there now and if someone wants access, they meet me at that clarity — or they stay on the old line.