Before You Tear It All Down, Check the Condensation Line
The leak is just a symptom, not the problem.
⏳ 3 min read
Woke up this morning to water dripping from our kitchen ceiling.
Not a gush. Not a flood. Just a slow, steady drip — the kind that tells you there's a pool of doom quietly waiting above the sheetrock.
Directly overhead? Our bathroom.
This is where we all gasp in unison.
Cue the montage: ceilings collapsing, walls buckling, a biblical flood crashing down — straight out of The Poseidon Adventure. Total carnage. Emotional ruin. Cinematic chaos.
Too far? Probably.
Anyway, I did the responsible thing at 5:45 in the morning with no coffee — checked the pipes, the sinks, the toilet. All dry. All suspiciously… normal.
and then I made coffee...
And still, the drip continued.
Cue the sound of irony.
As the ceiling and the coffee both dripped, I imagined the worst: a hidden pipe quietly betraying us from the subfloor above.
A leak so elusive it takes a battalion of experts weeks to locate, all while camped out in our kitchen, billing by the hour like it’s their full-time job, and they're aiming to collect a pension.
Just like The Poseidon Adventure — minus the ship, the ocean, and the 1970s disaster film budget.
(Okay, still too far — but I had to try one more time)
But then — a ray of sunshine breaks through a cloudy day. In our weekly meeting, my business coach Jennifer drops this gem: “It might not be a pipe.”
She says it like a plot twist.
Wait, what?
“It could be your air conditioning unit. A clogged condensation line. A system doing its job… With nowhere for the water to go, it finds the weakest point in the ceiling and escapes. That drip? It might not be anywhere near the actual problem.”
She sips her tea like she’s solved all of the world's plumbing.
“Check the condensation line first,” she adds, equal parts sage advice and mic drop.
How many of us do the same thing?
We feel the drip — the exhaustion, the irritability, the sadness we can’t explain —
and we assume something major is broken.
So we start tearing open ceilings.
We start rethinking old decisions, uprooting jobs, blaming spouses, our past, even God.
But what if the drip isn't anywhere near the actual problem?
What if we've just been holding too much — for too long —
and the pressure finally found the easiest way out?
Not to destroy us.
To escape.
The truth we held inside.
The grief we never grieved.
The story we kept quiet for everyone else's comfort.
They won't stay silent forever.
It's not random. It's release.
And it is sacred.
Sometimes healing doesn’t start with a breakthrough.
It starts with a drip.
Maybe you don’t have to tear everything down to heal.
Maybe it’s not the pipe.
Not the past.
Not the spouse.
Not the job.
Not even God.
Maybe you’re just full.
And the drip?
It’s your soul whispering:
There’s still work to do here.
Please make space.
👣 Keep going. You’re not alone.
Subscribe to the Impossible Path for reflections like this.
It’s free — and always will be.
If it spoke to you, feel free to share it —
or just take a deeper breath today.
I know it’s not actually about the water drip but my HVAC system was the cause of a recurring water leak in my ceiling 🙂.
But more importantly, your words about not needing to tear it all down and maybe just being full really struck me. I’m in a space where I got what I’ve said, for years, that I wanted - freedom to set my daily schedule - but it’s not really what I wanted. I retired from teaching high school math recently to run my home organizing and decorating business full time. After years of dreading Mondays even though I generally liked my job and my colleagues and dreaming about having that time freedom and being my own boss, I’m finding it’s not enough. I do love setting my own schedule - I mean, here I am at 8am still in my pjs, relishing another cup of coffee and reading blogs instead being halfway through an algebra class with 32 not-so-excited teens debating whether I had time to pee in the upcoming 5 minute passing period.
I love decluttering and organizing and styling work and I think I’ve found my niche with working with midlife and older women. In decluttering work, though, I’ve been more of an emotional support friend rather than someone who uses her design eye. And that is rewarding in many ways. I don’t want to be that pro who comes in with a team and does the work for the client and then does a big reveal of the “finished” product, after making sure the client dropped a grand on new containers that I earn commission on. But I’m not really satisfied creatively even though I do prefer organization work over interior decorating (I don’t like picking furniture and countertops for clients 🙄).
And I don’t have to work as much as I did as a teacher because I can charge a higher rate and have a partial teaching pension now. But there’s definitely something missing. I could work harder and build up my client base, for sure. I do have debts to pay off and two kids in Uni or law school. But I’m also bored. I don’t want to go back to teaching in the traditional sense. And I don’t want to give up my business. I do miss the act of teaching, though. And I have an insatiable desire to travel, especially with my children living in New Zealand and my love for Europe.
And I’ve been resisting doing some online coursework that I paid good money for to help create online courses - you know, something that could help me combine my love of design and organization with teaching and perhaps satisfy my theater-kid need to perform and be creative and would allow me to travel because I could work from anywhere. So why am I avoiding it? Good question, eh?
You’re making me think, Scott 🙂
It is so human to make a mountain out of a mole hill. Sometimes the drip is indicative of a potentially major problem and sometimes it is minor. Either way, you need to address the drip to get to the source and if you wait to address the little drip, it will only become bigger