Open House: On Strangers, Judgment, and the Writer’s Unease

Today, strangers are walking through my house. They are peering into closets, glancing at the scuff marks on the stairs, maybe silently judging my taste in rugs or the fact that I’ve never fixed that one crooked cabinet door. I’m not there to see it—I’ve been banished to a local café by my realtor, like some ghost of the property, politely asked to vanish so the living can come in and imagine their own futures.

It’s a strange, exposed feeling.

And it reminds me of writing.

There’s something deeply unsettling about the idea of strangers inhabiting the intimate spaces we’ve curated, cleaned, and, inevitably, cluttered with the mess of daily life. It’s vulnerability wrapped in civility. “Come in,” we say, “please make yourselves at home”—but also, don’t look too closely. Ignore the paint swatch I never committed to. Forgive the cracked tile we meant to replace.

When I write, I feel that same unease. Especially when I hit “submit” or “publish” or send a piece off to a friend or editor. That work, like my home, has been arranged and dusted and made presentable, but it also carries the fingerprints of my real life. My thoughts. My limitations. My taste in metaphor. My emotional plumbing.

And just like an open house, I’m not there to explain myself. I can’t follow the reader around saying, “I know that paragraph is clunky, I just couldn’t make it sing,” or “That character? Yes, he’s messy on purpose.”

There’s a silent contract with the reader, just as there is with potential homebuyers: walk through. Decide what you think. Maybe fall in love. Or maybe move on to the next listing without a second glance.

What I realized today—sitting in this café with my laptop open and my house full of strangers—is that there’s power in this discomfort. It’s easy to view these moments as unproductive interruptions. I could have scrolled my phone for two hours or tried to brute-force my way through some lifeless pages to hit a daily word count. But instead, I wrote something because I felt something.

And that’s the trick, isn’t it?

This unsettled, judged, slightly exposed feeling—it is a story. Or at least the seed of one. Maybe it’s about a haunted house. Or a character who hosts an open house and slowly realizes that none of the visitors are what they seem. Or maybe it’s something smaller: a blog post, grounded in the reality of selling a home, but stretching toward something wider about art and vulnerability.

But maybe what’s really important is that to move forward – to sell my house, to get something published, takes a pinch of bravery. We have to put ourselves out there, and let others judge it. And the reality is the best writing doesn’t always come from being at our most polished and productive. My house doesn’t need to be perfect to sell, it just needs one buyer to fall in love with it. The same goes for my writing. And sometimes, the best writing comes not from perfection but comes from emotion: the weird, raw in-between spaces—the metaphorical cafés where we wait for strangers to walk through our metaphorical houses. Those moments matter. They hold the tension. The vulnerability. The story.

And if nothing else, they remind us that unease is not the opposite of creativity—it’s often where it begins.

All feedback on this stream-of-consciousness blog post, as always, welcome in the comments below!