Sparklers, Texts, and the Job That Never Fully Clocks Out

It was the Fourth of July and I was in and out all night. Sparklers in the driveway with my girls, then a text I had to answer before I could hand the lighter back to Juniper. Present in pieces, stitched together between phone calls, the way most holidays go for me now.

I saw a colleague post something similar not long ago, about missing part of a concert because a deal needed her in that exact moment, and it stuck with me. Not because it was a new idea. Because I don’t think we say it out loud enough in this business.

Real estate is hard in a specific way that people outside it rarely understand. It’s not the paperwork, though there’s plenty of it. It’s not the hours, though there are more of them than anyone tells you going in. It’s that you’re handling one of the biggest financial and emotional decisions most people will ever make, sometimes several at once, and you’re expected to hold everyone else’s fear and stress and excitement while staying steady enough to actually do the job. The seller who’s scared they’re leaving money on the table. The buyer terrified they’re about to overpay for the wrong house. A family splitting up a home after a death, trying to make decisions through a fog that has nothing to do with square footage. All of it lands on you, and somewhere underneath your own composure, you’re managing your own nervous system too. Nobody covers that part in pre-licensing.

I made a video a few weeks back about a lesson that took me longer to learn than I’d like to admit: when someone says something sharp to you mid-transaction, it’s almost never actually about you. People don’t get short with their agent because the agent did something wrong. They get short because they’re scared, or overwhelmed, or watching a number that used to feel abstract turn into something they now have to live inside. You become the nearest safe place to put that feeling. Not because you deserve it. Because you’re there, and you’re calm, and calm is sometimes the only thing in the room that looks like it can hold what someone’s carrying.

Here’s the part that doesn’t get talked about enough. This job stays on whether or not the people around you remember that it’s supposed to be a job. Someone tells you to go really be there for your daughter’s birthday, put the phone away for once, and they mean it kindly. But an inspection falls through on a Saturday morning. An offer needs a response during dinner. A nervous buyer texts at nine on a holiday because the silence is eating at them and they need to hear it’s still fine. You answer, because that’s the job, and because the alternative is someone lying awake scared when a two minute reply could have fixed it.

I don’t resent it. I chose this, and I’d choose it again. But choosing something doesn’t mean it costs you nothing, and I think agents do each other a disservice when we pretend the cost isn’t real. You miss things. Usually small things. But real ones.

What I’ve been building toward, slowly, is a version of this business where my income isn’t solely tied to being on all the time. That hasn’t magically fixed the always-on nature of client work, and I want to be honest about that instead of pretending Powerhouse solved a problem that’s baked into the profession itself. What it has done is give me a longer horizon to build toward protecting something, even something small, a non-negotiable five minutes at the end of the night where the phone is somewhere else in the house and nobody can find me. Some of that comes from having other agents in my network who can actually step in, not just answer a call, but handle it the way I’d handle it myself.

Willow starts school soon, and I want to be the one standing at drop off more mornings than not. I don’t think this job is ever going to fully clock out. I’ve stopped waiting for a version of real estate where it does. But I do think you can build toward holding both things, showing up fully for your clients and protecting something for yourself, without pretending either one doesn’t cost you.

If you’re the person everyone else’s stress lands on and you’re not sure how much longer you can carry it solo, I’d be glad to talk through what a more shared structure could look like for you. No agenda, just a conversation from someone who’s still figuring out her own version of this too.