How dare I crave connection when all I have to offer is silence?

A confession from someone who never confesses. On craving what I keep refusing

I learned early to sort people into categories. Not out of coldness or at least, that is what I told myself but out of precision. Classmates. Benchmates. Schoolmates. Colleagues. Acquaintances. Each word a clean container, each person slotted into their rightful place. By the time most people my age were collecting friends the way children collect things they don't know what to do with, I had built a taxonomy instead. Neat. Organised. Honest, I thought.

By that logic, I have never had a friend.

I have no friends. I have a very organised loneliness instead.

There was someone I knew since the fifth grade. He was the kind of person who talked freely, about his feelings, his fears, the way certain days sat heavy on him. I liked listening. I was good at it. People often told me so, as if my silence were a gift I was giving them rather than a wall I was hiding behind. He would pour himself into our conversations and wait, the way you wait after you've said something important, for an echo. What he got was the sound of a room that absorbs everything and gives nothing back.

Silence, I have learned, is the most dishonest gift you can give someone.

He used to call me one of his best friends. I could never say the same. Not because he wasn't close, he was the closest, by a significant margin if at all but my definition wouldn't stretch that far, and I refused to lie about the distance. He felt it. He called it a power imbalance. He was right. There he was, open and offering, and there I was, above it all or at least appearing that way. He asked me once to open up. I didn't. Couldn't. Wouldn't. The line between those three words has always been blurry for me. He felt comfortable around me and miserable about it. That combination is something I have done to people more than once. I have cut them loose before they could name what I was doing to them, or before I had to watch it happen.

Then there is the boy I have known since second grade. Ours is a different thing. We don't demand from each other. We don't call to check in, don't text without reason, don't perform the rituals of friendship that everyone else seems to find necessary. On the surface it looks dead. From the inside it is the most alive thing I have, quiet in the way still water is quiet, not empty. When we meet, we meet fully. There is an unspoken understanding between us I have never been able to manufacture with anyone else. Maybe it works because it does not ask me to be anything. Maybe the absence of demand is the only door I know how to walk through.

There was also a girl. She was the nicest person I have known, Nicest in the active sense, not the adjective people use when they can't think of anything else to say. She made calls. She sent texts. She showed up in the small ways that accumulate into something large over time. I received it all and returned very little. I was present but not available, there but behind glass. I still think I was the problem. It is the one conclusion I have not found a way to intellectualise out of.

---

Recently, the fifth grade classmate said what he had always felt, that he tells me everything and I tell him nothing. He said I probably have trust issues.

I sat with that for a moment. Then I disagreed.

Trust issues imply a history of betrayal. They imply you gave someone the keys and they burned the house down. But I have never given anyone the keys. I have never opened up enough to feed betrayal even a chance. So how can trust be the diagnosis? If the wound never existed, you cannot blame the scar.

You cannot accuse a locked door of being broken.

What it is, I think, is something more layered and less dramatic than trust.

I don't open up because some part of me does not want the attention. There is something uncomfortable about being the subject, about people leaning in, asking follow-up questions, holding your story in their hands. I am far more comfortable as the one holding.

Except that isn't entirely true either. Because I do want the attention, sometimes. What I don't want are the consequences. The possibility that someone listens closely and then uses what they heard, not maliciously necessarily, but carelessly. That my story floats away from them like a loose thread they forget they're holding. That I said something real and it landed nowhere.

Then there is the question of dynamics. Every relationship I have settles into a particular shape, and I grow comfortable with that shape. Opening up feels like renovating a room someone already lives in, disruptive, potentially permanent. I am not sure the version of me that shares is one the people around me have made space for. And I am not sure I want to find out.

There is also this thing, I do not want to be seen through the eyes of sympathy. Empathy at a certain depth starts to look like pity, and pity requires weakness, and I have spent a long time making sure weakness is not the first thing visible when someone looks at me. Maybe not even the second.

And underneath all of it, the one that feels most true and most embarrassing, is the weight. My personal things are heavy. Not in a way I cannot carry, but in a way that feels unfair to hand to someone else. What if they aren't built for it? What if I watch them buckle? The heaviest lift I have ever done is carrying myself. At least I know I won't drop it.

I am not afraid of people knowing me. I am afraid of what knowing me costs them.

---

So I do not share. And I have gotten very good at not sharing.

Good enough that the loneliness has had to find creative ways to remind me it is still there. I have predicted things before they happened, processed them before I could feel them, intellectualised until the feeling dulled into something I could set on a shelf and not look at directly. Some people call this emotional intelligence. I think it is closer to a coping mechanism I forgot to stop using. I am emotional, deeply, I know that but I have arranged my emotions so they do not interfere with anything else. They live in a separate room. I check on them occasionally.

The only place I have never had to perform self-sufficiency is in spirituality. There, I am not wary of being seen. Something above me, call it what you want, has never asked me to explain the walls, never felt frustrated by my silence, never needed the dynamics to stay a certain way. It has simply shown up when things became too much. That is, I think, my version of intimacy, a relationship that asks nothing of me but presence.

Being self-contained is pretty much how I have been. I have not depended on anyone emotionally, and I do not think I have lost anything sharp because of it. But I would be lying if I said I haven't lost anything at all.

The problem with being your own anchor is that you also become your own ocean.

I have mastered the art of being someone people feel close to without ever letting them be close.

Here is what I cannot think my way out of.

I crave connection. Real, deep, seen-by-someone connection. I feel it the way you feel a hunger your logic tells you you shouldn't have embarrassing, inconvenient, stubbornly there. And I do not know what to do with a craving I have no idea how to feed. I have been built, over years of careful construction, into someone who is brilliant in solitude and starving inside it at the same time.

I have no friends, really. Just a sense of having them. The shape of closeness without the substance of it, like holding a word in your mouth whose meaning you've forgotten.

How dare I crave connection when all I have to offer is silence?

I don't know. I have sat with that question long enough to stop expecting an answer. Maybe the craving is not a failure. Maybe it is the one honest thing left, the part of me the walls forgot to reach.

Or maybe I am still just predicting and processing.

I genuinely cannot tell anymore.

Still from Past lives (2023)

Dearest Reader,

Thanks for your attention all the way!

Happy Reading:)