The Hardest Room to Be In
Bowline Hotel in Astoria made it easy. Being present was the hard part.
The Same Room
Two people can live through the exact same experience and come out the other side with a completely different version of what just happened.
Not a different opinion. A different reality.
Most of us know this is true and still can’t quite accept it. We keep asking the people we love why they can’t just understand. Why they can’t just relax. Why they can’t just let it go.
Nobody is inside your head but you. And no matter how well someone knows you, no matter how many years they’ve spent watching you, they are working from the outside. Always. They are making their best guess about what it’s like in there.
A little over a year ago, I was diagnosed with moderate/severe ADHD. Before that, I spent most of my life wondering why I couldn’t seem to stop fixating. Why I was constantly searching for the next thing before I’d finished the current one.
Now I know. It may not change how I am, but at least I can explain it. Sort of.
I can’t explain the mental itch of needing everything to happen at once while simultaneously wanting the entire world to shut the hell up. It’s an exhausting, high-friction way to live.
My husband Cade can sit in a quiet room and just be in it. No phone, no project, no background noise. He doesn’t need anything else going on. That is genuinely foreign to me.
I worry sometimes that he thinks I reach for the phone to get away from him. That if he'd planned it differently, or asked differently, I'd just put it down.
It’s never that. It has never once been that.
But I can’t make him know what it’s like to be inside my head, any more than he can make me know what it’s like not to be. Fourteen years together doesn’t change that. A diagnosis helps. It gives him at least a moderate understanding, and it allows me to forgive myself.
This is not a problem we have. This is just what it is to be two different people, in the same room, having a completely different experience of it.
The Trip
We’ve been to Astoria a couple of times before. It’s rugged, rain-slicked, and doesn’t apologize for its edges. So when a window opened up before Cade had to leave for his ten-week rotation, we decided to jump on it.
We’re leaving Oregon at the end of the summer. For the next several months we’ll be busy preparing for the move. After that, getting back here requires a flight and a plan.
So we booked a room at our favorite hotel, loaded Chase into the car, and headed west for a few days.
I was working most of the weekend. As I usually am. Distracted, somewhere else in my head, not fully there.
On our last night, knowing he’d be leaving for Florida just a few days after we got home, Cade decided to do something about it.
He set up one of the barrel saunas outside our door. Then he filled the soaking tub. Then he asked me to put my phone down and come have a drink with him at the bar.
With every single one of those things, I struggled.
Here’s what actually happens in my head when someone I love tries to give me something quiet and beautiful.
My brain says he’s telling me I’ve been doing something wrong. That’s never what Cade is saying. But it’s how my ADHD brain interprets it.
So I get defensive. I push back a little. Then the guilt sets in, because I know it’s not him. So I try my damnedest to be present.
I get in the sauna. I sit in the tub. I put the phone face down at the bar. And while I’m doing all of it, my brain is running completely amuck.
The thing is, I want to sit in the sauna and feel nothing but the heat. I want what Cade has, that ability to just be somewhere, more than I can explain.
But I don’t have an on/off switch. So I do the next best thing. I try. Every time, imperfectly, I try. I just worry that maybe sometimes, he wonders if it’s him. It never is.
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The Bowline
We stayed at the Bowline the first time we visited Astoria. We enjoyed it so much, it didn’t take long to decide to stay there again. They allow dogs, which is non-negotiable for Chase.
Before we arrived, Cade had been messaging back and forth with the hotel. They’d reached out the day before as a courtesy, just checking in, asking if there was anything they could do. He mentioned the pillows. I’m allergic to feathers.
Someone named Kat called. Confirmed the pillows, handled it, and offered a proactive upgrade to the Ice House Suite at a discounted rate. We hadn’t asked. She was paying attention.
When we arrived, we were immediately greeted by Jim at the front desk. Huge smile, bubbly personality. We had an instant rapport with him.
The Ice House Suite is incredibly spacious. The ceilings have to be twenty feet. The floors are heavy, rustic, and feel like they’ve actually seen a storm or two.
The picture windows are the real star. Cade loved watching the ships roll in. Chase was on alert for sea lions popping their heads out of the water right outside the window.
There's a dual head shower, and the soaking tub is stocked with local Oregon coast sea salts. It's a detail that costs next to nothing, but makes you feel like someone actually put some thought into the guest experience.
The welcome drink was a prosecco. Usually, that’s a red flag for cheap house swill. This wasn’t. It was genuinely good.
They checked in every day of our stay. Not intrusively. Just to ask if there was anything we needed.
By the time we unpacked, every obstacle between us and just being there had been quietly removed.
What was left was us.
I Don’t Know Much.
But I know this.
What Kat did before we arrived wasn’t just good service. It was good operations.
Twelve years cooking for billionaires on superyachts will teach you that you can’t scramble mid-service. You can’t put out fires when you’re three days from the nearest port and cooking for people who notice everything and grade on no curve.
In a galley, if you aren’t three steps ahead of the guest’s next whim, you’re already drowning. The Bowline understands that drowning isn’t a hospitality strategy.
Reactive hospitality is exhausting for everyone, staff included. When a team is constantly catching up, guests feel that tension.
When a hotel anticipates, a message the day before, a call to confirm, a detail handled before you walk through the door, the whole place runs smoother. Calmer. And that calm is what guests experience as atmosphere.
Before you book somewhere, pay attention to the first real message you receive from an actual person. Not the confirmation email. The first time someone reaches out with something specific and useful.
If it’s proactive, you’re in good hands. If it’s a form, a chatbot, or silence, you know where you stand.
We drove home the next morning. Chase in the back. The coast disappearing behind us.
Cade had spent the whole evening trying to bring me into the present. He does that. Keeps trying, even knowing I’ll struggle to stay there.
I don’t know exactly what I left in Astoria. I’m not sure what I brought home.
But somewhere in that suite on the river, with the sea lions outside the window and the phone face down at the bar, he asked me to be there.
I was there. Every scrambling, distracted, guilty, loving part of me. That’s the only way I know how to show up. After fourteen years, he still sets up the sauna.
–R. Michael
Bowline Hotel is located at 1 9th Street, Astoria, Oregon, on the Columbia River. Dogs welcome. Book direct on their website.
R. Michael is a former luxury yacht chef, a food and travel writer, and a reliable source of opinions nobody asked for. This is Ungarnished.
From the Archive
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Your words today were so damn good, probably because they hit so close to home, and I'm really glad you were willing to write them. My husband is ADHD. I am like Cade. We've been married 60 years, and we're still figuring out how to live together. We have conversations about how our different brains are wired. How, though all words are English, we nevertheless speak different languages to each other. It's hilarious, but not always. But it is always an adventure. As we age, we've discovered that our differences actually keep us steady. Again, many thanks.
Beautifully written, once again! I love you and I adore your ADHD brain ❤️