The People Who Went Quiet

It is somebody's birthday and the table is full. Someone asks how the work is going, so I answer. Two sentences, nothing long.

There is a small pause of the kind that isn't rude. Then I am asked whether I have eaten, and whether I am sleeping enough, and the table moves on to who is driving whom home.

Nothing about it is hostile. I have just been handled.

That is my own people, and it took me years to see it for what it is.

I always read that line as being about critics

“Not everyone will understand your journey.” Every version of that sentence I ever saw was pointed at strangers. People who doubt you, or talk about you, or would quite like you to fail.

Strangers turned out to be the easy part. I could ignore them, and I did.

The ones who went quiet had been there from the beginning. I did not see that coming, and I had no idea what to do with it.

Nobody announces it

There is no argument and no falling out. The better things went for me, the less anybody asked. Not unkind. Just further away.

What I worked out late is that nobody in that room is comparing me to anyone. They are comparing me to a child they remember, and she is not in a competition, so a good year has nothing to beat.

To ask about the work, they would have to swap that child for the woman sitting at the table. It is easier not to ask. So nobody does, and I get asked about sleep instead.

The part I got wrong for years

I tried to close the gap myself, and looking back the effort was almost embarrassing. At those same tables I would hear myself turn a good year into “same as always, a lot of running around”, watch everyone settle, and feel the relief along with them.

It didn't help. You cannot talk somebody into being glad for you, and after a while I stopped trying.

And I got something out of staying small. It kept every one of those dinners easy, and it meant I never had to find out what happens if I stop. That was the real reason, underneath the kind one I was telling myself.

What I think now

Some people love you and also love the version of you that stopped changing. With your own people those are the same person, more or less by definition, and it took me a long time to hold that without deciding somebody had failed me.

Staying easy for them meant staying smaller than I had any reason to be. I am not willing to pay that any more, and I am saying it about people I love, not people I fell out with.

So I stopped explaining

Some people just get it, and there is nothing to explain to them in the first place. The rest keep their old picture of me. I have stopped correcting it.

This is quieter than it used to be, and I won't pretend that it costs nothing. I still go to their birthdays. I go without the update.

You can love people and still stop asking their permission to change.

The next birthday

Somebody will ask whether I have eaten. I will say yes, because I will have eaten.

The other question is one I have stopped waiting for. I have not stopped noticing that it doesn't come.

If somebody close to you went quiet, I would like to know when you noticed. I don't mean a falling out. I mean the moment you realised the question had stopped coming. Write to me, those replies become the next pieces.

This is UNTOLD. Where leadership sounds like a real voice.