Lies That Obscure the Gifts of Silence
When I was growing up, my dad taught me in no uncertain terms that I was completely responsible for the way people reacted to me. He taught me that if other kids didn’t like me, it was because I was doing something wrong or there was something wrong with me.
Then when I was a young teen, he told me that if I didn’t censor and filter my heart, I was going to “scare boys off.“
Those words he spoke in probably one conversation, remain etched in my heart to this day.
The most powerful man in the universe told me - in so many words - that my heart and being were fundamentally scary.
I just have no words for the leveling devastation of that.
I have walked through my entire life believing that my love is horrifying to people.
I have believed to my core that it is just not possible for a man to love me.
It still feels impossible, five years into this healing work.
A few years ago, a friend asked me if the man I’ve long loved from afar knew how I felt about him.
First of all, I was taken aback by his question, because until that moment it had never occurred to me that it could possibly matter.
My love being returned was so far out of the realm of possibility that it didn’t even register for me to contemplate.
I had been very open about what he’d brought to my life but had always stopped short of speaking the central truth of my feelings.
I told my friend I wasn’t sure if he knew or not, but that I was pretty sure he’d be horrified if he did.
I will never forget my friend’s response.
“He’s not going to be horrified. That’s not a human reaction.”
For as long as I have been breathing air on this planet, I have believed that horror is exactly the reaction people would have to my loving them. Then thanks spending years in a very closeted and self-hating small town gay community with its horrific narrative about women, I’ve also long believed that anyone I loved would be physically repulsed ... Literally throwing up at the thought of me.
Another of the most powerful voices in my life, my best friend of nearly 25 years now, actually spoke those words to me.
“Honey I love you, but we can’t have sex or I’ll puke.”
He spoke them in jest, of course - and at 18 years old - but like my dad‘s words, coming from a voice that mattered so deeply to me, they were seared into my consciousness for life.
All that to say, the most powerful voices in my life taught me that I don’t get to be loved because I am fundamentally horrifying and repulsive.
Most importantly, they taught me that people’s reactions to me were about me.
So, I’ve spent the past five years on one side of a chasm of silence with a man I’ve long loved from afar. Not complete silence; he shows up now and then, in moments that are far too frequent and miraculous to dismiss as mere coincidence.
When I began this journey, though, I was nowhere near ready for a relationship. I knew I had years of healing to do before I’d be able to love someone, so it’s never been about pursuing him or making something happen. It’s always simply been about healing my heart and coming to know the truth of love.
I had no concept of love - of any kind - before he walked into my world five years ago this December 22.
It remains about healing my heart and coming to know the truth of love, but I’ve stopped saying my heart isn’t healed enough to love someone.
Words are powerful, and those are no longer true.
Knowing that I wasn’t ready for a relationship and that that simply wasn’t the path I was on as I did the work of healing my heart, however, didn’t make the longing any less profound or the silence any less deafening.
Nor did it change what I had long understood that silence to mean:
I was unworthy of my beloved.
I felt the weight of that silence as a statement on my fundamental worth on this planet.
Then my friend Steven McMorran’s song Brooklyn showed up.
Its stunningly beautiful lines gave me one of the most life-altering gifts ever to grace my path:
Simply another possibility of what could be happening on the other side of that chasm of silence.
The truth is I have no idea what’s happening on the other side of that silence.
It’s not mine to know.
This song, though, was the first moment in my life I was able to feel and know this powerful truth to the deepest places in me:
Whatever is happening over there, it’s his.
He has his own story and life and history and wounds and joys and struggles that have nothing to do with me.
That silence largely has nothing to do with me.
It’s certainly not the statement on my fundamental worth and value I imagine it to be.
Whatever his feelings are - about me or anything else - they are all about him and what he’s walking through and carrying.
That is the case with every single one of us.
I have no words for the gift that is Steven’s beautiful song.
The gift of this simple alternate narrative of what could be happening over there.
It’s such a powerful reminder that it’s not the silence that hurts ... It’s the lies I fill it with.
I have no idea if this narrative is remotely what’s happening over there.
But when I quiet the lies and sit with what little of his story I know to be true, it not only feels deeply possible, but far more likely than the shattering things I’ve imagined for my whole life.
It’s amazing how much of what we think we know is assumption and complete fabrication.
How much of what we feel comes from vicious lies we are telling ourselves.
Stories we’re not even aware we’ve made up from scratch in our own minds and hearts.
I promise you, friends, the truth is infinitely better than the lies we imagine.
I don’t know what’s happening on the other side of that silence, but I finally know it’s not about me.
Silence used to terrify me.
It was the scariest place I knew.
Then I discovered something.
Silence is mystery.
And mystery is fucking miraculous.
Everything is possible in it.
As my experience and understanding of silence shift away from the terror of hopelessness to the magic of possibility - shifting from a posture of control to a posture of openness to whatever wonder may unfold - I’ve been brought to tears by the opening line of Enation’s stunning 30 Second Formula:
“What if silence is our motherland?”
No one knows what the next moment holds, including those we believe hold all the power.
Josh Groban’s exquisite beauty Granted never fails to bring me to tears with this simple truth:
“Tomorrow’s undecided.”
And so it is.
Always.