What My Silence Means

You have noticed that I do not always reply straight away, and you have decided what it means. You are almost certainly wrong.

Start with what silence is not. It is not a technique. I am not leaving you waiting because I read somewhere that waiting sharpens appetite, though it does. I am not measuring the gap for effect. If I were, you would feel it, because manufactured absence has a texture to it and you are more perceptive than you give yourself credit for.

What you are actually experiencing is a very old problem wearing modern clothes. You sent something into a space where you cannot see me, and now you have no information, and a mind with no information does not sit quietly. It fills. It writes the reply I have not sent, usually in the least generous version available, and then it responds emotionally to a message I never wrote. That is the whole of the discomfort. Not my silence. Your commentary on my silence.

Notice what you do in the gap. You reread what you sent. You find it too eager, or too careful, or too much. You consider sending another one to soften the first, which is the instinct I would ask you to resist, because the second message is never for me. It is for you, to relieve the feeling. Sending it hands the discomfort to me and takes the lesson away from you.

Because there is a lesson, and it is not about patience, which everyone assumes. It is about your relationship with not knowing. Most of what you find difficult is not deprivation, it is uncertainty, and the two are constantly mistaken for each other. You can tolerate wanting something enormously. What you cannot tolerate is wanting it without knowing whether it is coming. That is worth understanding about yourself, and you will never learn it from someone who answers immediately.

So sit in it, and pay attention rather than performing patience at me. The first stretch is loud. Then something settles, and you will find the wanting is still entirely present but the panic underneath it has gone, and those two things were never the same thing at all. Most people go their whole lives without separating them.

And when I do reply, notice how much of what you built in the interval had nothing to do with me. I was not withholding. I was not displeased. I was elsewhere, living a life you are not entitled to the details of, and I came back because I intended to come back, which was true the entire time you were doubting it.

That is what my silence means. It means I have not spoken yet. Everything else in it, you put there.