Every old house has a story. This one started telling it from the driveway.

Robert saw it first, and Robert wanted it. I want you to remember that part, because it matters later. Not that I’m ever going to say I told you so. But in this case, I didn’t offer a “maybe not.” I didn’t offer a strong enough “I don’t think we should.”

From the outside, the house looked like it had lived a few lives and wasn’t ready to talk about all of them. Paint that had given up in places. Windows that seemed to be looking out at you, keeping an eye on the whole street.

You tell yourself a house can’t tell you anything. It’s wood and nails and an asking price. You keep telling yourself it’s just a house.

But this house wore two perpetual expressions, depending on the time of day you approached it. One was a warning: Stay away. The other was exasperation: I thought I told you to stay away.

This house clearly had its own agenda.

The price should have been the first clue. The house wasn’t on the market the usual way. Somehow it had ended up with the city, and the city put it up for auction. Robert saw an opportunity. A good buy. And it was a very good price, the kind of price that hints a house has more going on than just being a house.

Inside, there were no rooms. Not in the way an old house is supposed to have rooms, small and closed and full of corners. Here, one space poured into the next. From the front door you could see straight through to the kitchen and out the back windows. There was nowhere to hide that you couldn’t be seen.

On the first day, we didn’t mind.

By the second night, we wondered why exactly there were no private spaces here.

By the third night, we wanted some.

The house smelled like dusty, wet carpet. Not freshly wet. The kind of dampness that seemed to have settled in years ago and decided to stay. We tried everything we could think of, but the smell never left. Eventually, I began to wonder whether it was coming from the house or whether the house itself was the smell.

It felt as if the walls themselves were always looking at you. And they weren’t just looking. They were judging. I distinctly remember one night eating chicken from a questionable restaurant, the only place still open because we’d waited too late to go get food. The house groaned as we ate. It creaked. It had an opinion about what we had brought in.

Can I prove that? No.

Did I feel it? Yes.

Do we believe it? Absolutely.

Then there were the stairs.

Upstairs, things looked almost normal. A bedroom to the left. A bedroom to the right. A bathroom. But next to the bathroom was another set of stairs. Nobody mentioned them. Nobody explained them. They were simply there, the way a question is there when no one wants to ask it.

If you were brave enough to climb them, you found a room made of concrete and some tile. A spigot with a hose attached. And a drain. A big drain.

Not a bathtub. Not a shower. Just a hose, a hard floor, and a drain built for something that needed to be washed away.

Robert went up first. He stood there looking around, and his thought was a very somber one: What have I gotten myself into? Then: What is this place? What would someone do with a room like this?

He stood there longer than he intended, looking from the hose to the drain and back again. There was nothing moving, nothing making a sound. Still, he had the uncomfortable feeling that he’d walked into a room without knowing what happened there, or why it had been left behind.

He came back down the stairs thinking about it. And somewhere on the way down, he remembered the name of the town. I won’t tell you the real one. I’ll just say it ended in “ville,” and suddenly it sounded a lot like Amityville. So we’ll call it Ville.

The town didn’t help matters.

Ville felt as though someone had carved it out of another time and forgotten to bring it forward. There was a post office that looked like an ordinary house, except for a handwritten sign announcing ‘Post Office’. Next door was another house that apparently served as a hardware store. It looked as though someone had simply painted the name on the side and opened for business.

He ventured into the post office once. To this day, he doesn’t remember what he went in to ask. He remembers only that he wanted to get back out.

It wasn’t that anything happened. That was the unsettling part. Nothing ever quite happened.

Then the neighbors started appearing.

I say appearing because that’s what they did. Robert would be out front, or carrying something in from the car, and someone would simply be there. No footsteps. No car door. Just a neighbor, standing a little closer than you’d expect, as if they’d been waiting for him to come outside.

It was an investment house, so we didn’t live there full time. Every visit, we arrived as strangers all over again. And every visit, someone was already waiting.

I started to wonder. Were they being creepy on purpose? Was it just these neighbors? Or was the whole town creepy, and the house simply fit right in?

And they only ever talked to Robert. Never to me.

They knew things. That was clear. But they didn’t tell things. One would nod at the house and say, “Yeah, you know. There’s a story.” And you’d wonder, well, what is the story? But no one ever told us. Another would ask how he was settling in, then look up at the second floor for a long moment and say nothing at all. They alluded. They hinted. They let a sentence trail off and then went back to wherever they’d come from.

Robert finally asked one of them outright. “I don’t know what’s going on with my house. There’s a room upstairs.”

The neighbor said, quietly, “Yeah. Yeah. We heard about that. We think that’s where they slaughtered animals. And then the blood just ran down.”

That was the most anyone ever said.

Robert’s mind went straight to the questions no one wants answered. The blood ran down. Down where? Why would anyone bring animals upstairs to do that? Where was the blood now? Had it run through the house?

He shook his head. “That’s one of those things I might not ever really want to know.”

Once he shared that, it was my turn to speak up. And this time, I didn’t hold back.

“I think it’s time we sell this house.”

We put it on the market. We didn’t make any money. We didn’t lose any either. We broke even, and the peace of mind of being rid of it was worth more than any profit.

The buyer was someone from the town. When we brought up the house, he said, and I quote, “Yeah, I know the history.”

We never asked him what he knew.

We just wanted to leave.

Some hauntings don’t need a ghost.

A first for me: an eerie story, written for The Writers Circle Spooky Storytime challenge. The house was real, the drain was real, and the neighbors were very, very real.

If this story resonated, give it a few claps (or 50!).

I’m a writer and executive leadership coach, and I love to tell stories. I’ve found that stories help us see things more clearly, look honestly at hard things, and sometimes discover something we might have missed otherwise. I work with leaders who are ready to think differently about how they lead and the kind of leader they want to be.

Come explore more of my writing at Natalie Ann Coaching, or follow me here on Medium.

This is one of those stories about too many things that had to happen, in order, for it to just be random.

It wasn’t love at first sight with us. Not close. We met at church, and Robert was dismissive — he didn’t know my story and didn’t seem interested in finding out. For a while we just orbited each other, tertiary, in and out of the same classes and the same events, never quite landing in the same conversation. There was a season where he was late to class often enough that I noticed, and once I asked him, half-teasing, if he’d even done the homework. He didn’t love that. I think for a long time I felt more tolerated than liked, and if you ask him, he’ll tell you that’s not true, but that was the feeling I carried.

Slowly, in the low-stakes way people become friends without deciding to, we got to know each other. Then one day he said something about how a woman like me wouldn’t give a man like him the time of day. I told him he didn’t actually know that, because he’d never asked.

So he asked. I told him I don’t drink coffee, but I do drink tea. He didn’t argue, didn’t suggest something else, and we ended up at Dunkin’ Donuts anyway, tea for me, coffee for him, and we talked until they closed the doors on us. That push and pull, him assuming, me correcting, him adjusting without making it a whole thing, turned out to be exactly how the rest of it went too.

Five months later we were engaged. We were both older, we knew what we wanted, and we didn’t see the point in waiting, so we decided to elope. We found a little town in Connecticut that did an elopement package, and it was perfect for us. Now I needed a dress and he needed a suit.

We were out shopping one night after work, looking specifically for that, and I found a beautiful blue dress at Burlington, chosen mostly for color and price, nothing more considered than that. We bought it and brought it home.

Later that night Robert said, “You’re not going to believe this.” He had a tie, one he’d taken from his father’s closet more than two decades earlier, for some event he’d needed to look sharp for, and had liked enough that he never gave it back. It had been sitting in his closet ever since, through moves, through an entire life he’d lived before he knew me, waiting for a reason to matter. It was the same exact blue as my dress.

I laughed and asked if he still had it. He went home, checked, and found it. He wore it to our elopement, and it matched the dress perfectly.

I don’t believe in coincidences. I believe what looks like one is usually just a story you haven’t finished understanding yet. Robert didn’t know, at thirteen years old, why he kept that tie. I didn’t know, all those years I wasn’t thinking about him, that a color I’d be drawn to on a random Tuesday was already waiting in his closet, matched and ready, before we’d even said a real word to each other.

We’ve been married thirteen years now, going on fourteen. It hasn’t been easy every year, but it’s been full, and I’ve never once been sorry we didn’t wait.

I think about that tie sometimes. How it sat there for over twenty years, patient, useless to anyone, until the exact right moment arrived and it turned out to have been the right thing all along. Maybe that’s how some parts of our lives work. We don’t know what they mean while they’re happening. Some things only look like coincidence because we haven’t lived long enough to understand the full story yet.

I’m an executive leadership coach and former school and district leader. I work with leaders who are ready to think differently about how they lead and the kind of leader they want to be, and I write about the everyday decisions that shape who we become.

If this resonated, you can find more at natalieanncoaching.com or follow me here on Medium for more.

I sleep facing the window.

No curtains, just blinds, because I love the view too much to block it. Most nights that’s a good trade. Some nights it isn’t.

A few weeks ago I woke up at 3 a.m., just me and the moon. Along with a little scattering of light from the houses across the way, all of it landing right on my face like God had a message for me, and the message was wake up.

I lay there for a minute, annoyed, doing the math on how many hours of sleep I had left. Then I remembered, not for the first time, that my blinds can tilt in two ways when closed. Tilted one way, I can still see hints of things outside. Tilted the other way, I see nothing at all. My sleepy 3 a.m. brain finally realized I’d closed them the wrong way, again. Ugh.

I did not get up and fix this.

I turned over, put a pillow over the side of my face that was catching the moonlight and went back to sleep, eventually.

Here’s the part I have to be honest about: this was not the first night this happened. It wasn’t even the fifth. I had had this thought before, the blinds, the direction, the simple fix, and each time I filed it under “later” and went back to sleep, eventually. I’d half-convinced myself that flipping the slats wouldn’t really make a difference. That the light would find a way in regardless. That it wasn’t worth the trouble of reaching over and turning a little plastic wand.

It’s a ten-second fix. I want to be very clear about how small this is. Ten seconds, one hand, no tools.

So a few nights ago, half-asleep and mildly furious, I finally reached over and turned it.

The room went dark. Actually dark. No moon, no porch lights, nothing but the ceiling. I went back to sleep in a few minutes, which for me is practically a personal record.

And then I lay there, smug in the dark, thinking: that’s it? That was the whole problem?

The next morning I needed to sit with that whole blinds situation and the true fact that this was going on for weeks. The real question I had for myself is why I let a problem I could solve in ten seconds run rampant for weeks. Why did I prefer to adapt around an irritation, build a whole workaround involving a pillow and a bad attitude, rather than just try the obvious small thing?

I don’t think I’m unusual in this. I think we each have a version of the blinds. Something small, cheap, reversible, sitting right there, that we’ve decided, without ever testing it, isn’t worth doing because surely it wouldn’t really fix anything. So we tolerate the moonlight instead. We keep the pillow over our face. We build the workaround, and we call the workaround normal.

What also gets me is the reversibility of it. If flipping the blinds hadn’t worked, I would have lost nothing. Ten seconds, no damage, flip them back. It wasn’t a renovation. It wasn’t a hard conversation. It wasn’t a decision I’d have to defend to anyone. It was a small, forgettable, low-stakes gesture I’d been avoiding like it would cost a whole lot.

I wonder if other people have their own versions of the blinds? Not the big scary thing being avoided, the small one. The one where the answer is already thought of. The one you’ve told yourself wouldn’t really make a difference, mostly so you don’t have to find out that it would.

I’m curious about that.

Apparently, sometimes the answer really is as simple as just turning the little plastic wand.

I’m an executive leadership coach and former school and district leader. I work with leaders who are ready to think differently about how they lead and the kind of leader they want to be, and I write about the everyday decisions that shape who we become.

If this resonated, you can find more at natalieanncoaching.com or follow me here on Medium for more.

A note before you begin: This is a story about my birthday and the years I spent working in Tower Two of the World Trade Center. I know this date carries weight for many people. If today is not a day you have room for that, take care of yourself first.

I was born on September 11.

For most of my life, it was simply my birthday. Phone calls from family, maybe dinner with friends. Another quiet marker of time passing.

In my early twenties, I worked for Shearson Lehman Brothers on the 102nd floor of Tower Two. I was 22 when I started. By 24, I had settled into the rhythm of the place and loved the job. It was New York City in the way a young person imagines it: busy, ambitious, full of possibility.

The Trade Center was more than an office building. It was a small city. Shops, restaurants, and places where people met friends for coffee or lunch filled it. Even after I left for another opportunity, I still spent time there. I visited to shop at the Company Store. I met friends who still worked in the towers. It was familiar territory.

When I worked there, my mornings followed the same pattern. I arrived early, stopped at Au Bon Pain for coffee and something small to eat, and headed upstairs. By around 8:30, I would be at my desk on the 102nd floor, starting the day.

Then September 11, 2001, happened.

Like so many people, I watched the events unfold in disbelief. But beneath the shock was another realization that took time to settle into my body.

If I had still been working there, I would have been at work that morning.

Before I left, the company offered me the chance to stay. They were willing to match the offer I had received from another company and increase my salary. It was generous, but I was young and eager to try something new. A different company. A different area of finance. A chance to grow.

At the time, it was simply a career decision.

Looking back, it became something else entirely.

If I had stayed, I would have followed my usual routine that morning. Coffee downstairs. Something small to eat. Then upstairs to the 102nd floor.

By 8:30, I would have been at my desk. I didn’t make it out. For a long time after the attacks, I could not bear to look at my World Trade Center ID. The card felt like a painful reminder of everything that had been lost. One day, I shredded it.

At the time, it felt necessary. I wanted distance from the memory. Years later, I sometimes wish I had kept it. Not to sell it or display it. Just to have it. A small piece of evidence from a place that was once part of my daily life. The truth is that the memory does not live in the card. It lives in me.

When your birthday is September 11, and you once worked on the 102nd floor of Tower Two, you cannot help but think about how life unfolds through decisions we make without realizing their future weight.

At 24, leaving that job felt like a normal career move. A step forward. An opportunity for growth. I did not know, when I made it, what I was actually choosing.

None of us can see the whole shape of a life while we are living it. We make ordinary decisions for ordinary reasons. We weigh what we know, choose a direction, and move forward. Only later do we sometimes understand what those decisions held.

That understanding does not make the past easier to explain. It does not turn survival into something I earned, or loss into something anyone deserved. It simply leaves me humbled by how little of the future any of us can see.

My birthday is still my birthday. It is also a day of remembrance, a day of grief, and a reminder of a life I might have lived but did not.

That is the birthday I carry.

Natalie Ann Morman is an executive leadership coach and former school and district leader. She writes about life, leadership, memory, and the everyday decisions that shape who we become.

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My Birthday Is September 11th was originally published in ILLUMINATION on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I was a career changer, and I needed a mentor.

Had I not had one, had I not had several, I would not be sitting here today, talking to anyone about my lived experience as a school leader. I would not have made it in the field. That isn’t humility or exaggeration. It’s the truth.

One afternoon early in September, my first week as a full time third grade teacher, I stood in front of thirty two students, seven and eight years old, and said something that sounded perfectly logical to me: “Get your book bags so we can pack up to go home.”

To a room of eight year olds at 2:40 in the afternoon, that landed less like an instruction and more like someone shouting “ready, set, go.”

They looked at each other. They looked at me. One little girl, I’ll call her E, looked at me like she was asking, are you sure about this. I nodded. And all thirty two of them took off for the closet at once.

It erupted. Book bags and jackets hit the floor. Kids pulling at each other, cracking up laughing, pure pandemonium. I was yelling wait, what are you doing, why are you doing that, and getting nowhere. E just shook her head, got her bag, and sat down, and I could see it in her eight year old eyes: disappointment, and something like wow, you’ve got a lot to learn.

That night I called my sister. She wasn’t just my sister. By then she’d been teaching second grade for more than ten years, had been recognized as an outstanding teacher, and had been nominated for teacher of the year. I wasn’t calling her for comfort. I was calling an expert.

I told her what happened, how I’d told the kids to get their book bags and jackets and they’d stormed the closet! I was indignant.

She listened. Then she said, “Well, you did tell them to get their jackets.”

I didn’t hang up on her, because I needed her. But she was right, and it’s stayed with me since. I’d given a general instruction to children who were used to structure and specific instructions, and they did exactly what I said, the way only eight year olds could.

I was a terrible first year teacher. I own that. I was convinced I’d be fired by Christmas. I’d come from a corporate environment where I was competent and successful, and walked straight into a profession where I was suddenly both unconsciously incompetent and consciously incompetent. I didn’t even know what I didn’t know, and once I realized how much that was, it was overwhelming.

What changed everything was the environment I landed in. My principal visited my classroom every day that first year. She didn’t just observe, she coached. She reviewed my lesson plans. She gave me feedback, showed me what to do, watched me try it, told me where to improve, circled back to see how it went. Her role was supervisory, but it was undergirded by mentoring. The mindset was always, this is how you do it, and I’m going to help you learn how.

Even with all of that support, I cried that afternoon after the book bag chaos. It wasn’t the first time that year, and it wasn’t the last. I tried never to cry in front of the students, but I cried at lunch more times than I want to admit. In January, my principal finally said to me, “That’s enough with the crying. You’re figuring it out. But every day, you cannot cry.” (I still don’t know how she knew I was crying.)

And through all of it, my sister was my secret weapon. She listened, let me cry, let me ask what I was sure were ridiculous questions. She never said, “You should have known better.” She said, “Well, now you know not to do that again.” That phrase became shorthand between us. Not judgment. Not shame. Just learning.

That is why mentoring can never be overrated for me. It wasn’t a nice add on or a program. It was the difference between staying and leaving. Between developing competence and internalizing failure. Between believing I belonged in the profession and believing I didn’t.

Mentoring isn’t a checkbox, and it isn’t a compliance structure.

Benefiting from the guidance of someone who has already been where you’re standing, who understands the nuances and knows where the landmines are, and who can show you without controlling you, is priceless. This isn’t a call for everyone to become a mentor. It’s a recognition of how much you stand to gain from one.

If you’re fortunate enough to be somewhere that formally sets you up with a mentor, take advantage of it. Even if you’re convinced there’s nothing to learn from the person you’ve been paired with, make it a personal challenge to find at least one thing.

And if mentoring isn’t formalized where you are, pay attention to who’s already offering it to you, whether they carry the title or not. Notice who shows you how the coffee station works without making it a thing. Notice who answers your questions without judgment, who you never hear make a veiled comment about how many questions you ask. Those people are already poised to mentor you. You just have to be alert enough to see it.

I’ve heard people talk about seeking out experts and asking directly for their time. I’m sure that has value. It wasn’t my path, so I can’t speak to it with any real insight. What I can tell you is that I watched for people doing the job well, people whose work I wanted to grow into, and I found small ways in. If someone I admired was eating lunch alone in their classroom, I’d ask if I could join them, and I made sure never to overstay my welcome. If we had a thirty minute lunch block, I’d stay fifteen and leave them some time for their own quiet. I soaked up everything I could, and when they told me to do something, I did it, especially if they were someone doing well at what I wanted to do.

Years later, I realized mentoring hadn’t started when I became a teacher. I’d been benefiting from it long before I knew to call it that.

When I worked at KPMG, there was a woman on the partner track, an executive I deeply respected. In a meeting once, I watched her cut the corners off her day planner, the little perforated triangles at the edge of each page. I had no idea what she was doing. She noticed me staring and explained: you cut the corner so you always know where to open the calendar to that day. I had the exact same day planner and had never once thought to do it. I went back to my desk and cut mine.

She saw me doing it later and laughed. “You went and did that.”

“Yes,” I said. “I didn’t know, and now I do.”

I wasn’t ashamed to admit I hadn’t known. And something shifted after that. She started sharing small things with me on purpose, what to bring to a certain meeting, a heads up before I walked into a room, telling me to listen carefully because what wasn’t said would matter as much as what was. That was mentoring too. It didn’t come with a title or a program. It came from someone willing to teach me how to navigate a space I didn’t yet know how to read.

Looking back, I wasn’t looking for mentors. I was looking for people who knew something I didn’t.

They showed me. They corrected me. They believed I could become someone different than the frightened first-year teacher who cried at lunch and thought she’d be fired by Christmas.

I’m grateful for every one of them. I hope I’ve become that person for someone else.

I’m an executive leadership coach and former school and district leader. I work with leaders who are ready to think differently about how they lead and the kind of leader they want to be, and I write about the everyday decisions that shape who we become.

If this resonated, you can find more at natalieanncoaching.com or follow me here on Medium for more.