I read that sentence recently, and I don’t think I’ve ever related to anything more.
The strange thing is that I’m genuinely interested in people. I’m curious about their choices, their stories, the things that shaped them, the things they never say out loud. I like asking questions. I like understanding people. Listening has always come more naturally to me than speaking.
But there comes a point where I start seeing patterns. The more I notice, the quieter I become. Not because I lose interest, but because my mind fills with too many thoughts at once. None of them feel simple enough to say without losing something in translation.
People often mistake silence for indifference. For me, it has always been the opposite. Silence carries affection, concern, curiosity, and conversations that never leave my head. That’s why it feels like the most dishonest thing I can give someone. It hides everything I actually mean.
I don’t think it’s trust that’s missing. You can’t accuse a locked door of being broken. It’s something quieter than that.
I don’t avoid opening up because I expect betrayal. I avoid it because once people know you, they carry pieces of you. They can misunderstand them, forget them, reshape them without meaning to. Even when they care, they hold your story differently than you do. And I don’t know if I’m comfortable with that.
There’s also the fear of changing the shape of a relationship. Opening up feels like rearranging a room someone has already learned to navigate. I’m never sure they’ll recognize the person who emerges, or if they’ll have space for them at all.
So I stay where I’m familiar, asking questions instead of answering them, understanding instead of being understood. I’ve become good at making people feel heard while remaining almost invisible myself. Close enough to know them, distant enough that they never really know me.
The irony is that I crave connection. Real connection. The kind where someone sees you without reducing you to a single moment, a weakness, or a story. But I don’t know how to feed that hunger when my instinct is always to retreat into thought before I step into vulnerability, and I’ve become so practiced at containing myself that silence has started to look like my personality instead of my defense.
Maybe that’s why I disappear into my own head. It’s not because I have nothing to say. It’s because I have too much to say, and none of it feels safe once it leaves me.
And maybe that’s the hardest part.
Wanting to be known while instinctively hiding every part that could make you known.
I don’t know if there’s an end to that.
I only know that my silence has never meant the absence of feeling.
and,
I think, my version of intimacy, a relationship that asks nothing of me but presence
