“Because I Know the Silence Too”

Sometimes the words we need most aren’t our own.

They arrive through someone else—quietly, unexpectedly—carrying the shape of a feeling we haven’t been able to name.

What follows is something I wrote from a deeply personal place. Not to be dramatic. Not to reopen the past. But to offer one possible angle of why some relationships fall silent. Of what might live beneath the disappearing. Of how shame and avoidance often wear the mask of closure.

It reads like something that could be shared by someone who doesn’t know how to say what they feel… and finds these words giving them the courage to feel it anyway.

If you’ve ever been left without explanation—or if you’ve ever been the one who left—maybe this is a place you can gently land.

"Removing yourself from someone’s life because you feel guilty about how you treated them is not holding yourself accountable. It’s avoiding further accountability and hoping the other person assigns you a noble reason for disappearing."

And now, from my heart —

I read those words, and I hear more than what’s written.
I don’t take pride in someone walking away, nor do I celebrate their silence. But I can feel the ache underneath—the shame, the guilt, the stories we tell ourselves when we feel we’ve failed someone.

I’ve known those feelings too.
I know how they can twist love into fear, truth into avoidance. And though you disappeared from my life, I don’t hold that against you.
I only wish you knew that you never had to earn my understanding — or hide from it.

Unspoken truth doesn’t dissolve; it lingers.
And over time, it can steal light from the eyes, joy from the breath.
I’ve seen it happen. I’ve felt it.

So if anything in you still carries that weight—
I hope you find release.
I hope your smile returns, not just as a surface expression, but as that deep, blinding joy that makes even angels blink.

I’m not here to judge or correct.
I just wish peace for you — and whatever healing lets you feel whole again.

And I say this not just to you, but from the truth of my own becoming.

I’ve been the one who walked away too — twice, I said it clearly:
I don’t want contact. I never want to speak again.
And I meant it… at the time.

I acted from a place of deep pain, of feeling small and lost—when the world I knew vanished around me, and I ended up in a strange emotional landscape with nothing familiar to hold onto.

When everything hurts, the instinct is to cut away whatever reminds you of it.
I tried to defend myself by removing what I thought was the cause of my wounds.
But the truth is, I was running from mirrors.
From myself.

Only when I began to love truth more than safety…
Only when I began to remember who I really am beneath the roles and masks…
Did I understand.

That kind of collapse — the breaking, the losing, the stripping of everything once precious — it let the light in.
And that light was me.
My soul.
My integrity.
My real self, waiting all along.

I’ve lied before. I’ve dishonored myself.
And I’ve carried that weight.
But never again.
That pain showed me the cost of untruth — and the miracle of coming home to honesty.

That’s why I understand the burden someone carries when they leave without speaking truth.
That’s why I feel for them, not against them.

Because I’ve been both.

And knowing that, I can only hope — gently — that when the time feels right,
Truth will feel safe enough to be lived again.
Not for me.
Not for the past.
But for the peace that comes when we no longer have to run.