You can change for real and have nothing to show for it. The people around you keep answering the person you used to be, and that version still works well enough to pull you back into it.
I have been living in that gap for a couple of years, and I am not out the other side of it. You know how I work by now, so I’ll skip the speech: the AI I work with spent most of this one telling me where I was reaching past what I knew. It caught me explaining a co-worker’s behavior with a theory I had no right to put inside his head. That came out. What I believe is mine. What I cannot prove is mine too. I decided what stayed. This time, I know exactly who I’m writing toward.
I have been writing into the room for a long time. Into it, at it, past it, hoping whoever needed it happened to be in there that day. So, I am changing that. From here, each one is written to a specific person, and this one is written to Sew Psycho. Everybody else is welcome to listen in.
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There is a co-worker who used to ignore me. My read was that he did not like me much, and I want to be careful with that, because it was my read and not anything he ever told me.
He is friendlier now. There are more conversations, and they run longer than they used to.
It happened gradually, and I cannot give you the day it started. It was not because I tried. I never set out to win him over at all. Here is the part I keep turning over. These new and improved conversations always happen at work when I’m forced to be talkative.
Somewhere in the last couple of years, I stopped managing how I came across. Whether people understood me, whether they thought well of me, whether they liked me, how fast they came back to me. I’d been running all of that underneath everything for so long that I didn’t experience it as effort. It was just what being around people cost, the way a shift costs you your feet.
I lower my walls and put up a protective screen instead.
Here is what I think happened, and I’m going to say it plainly instead of dressing it up. Reality takes time to catch up from personal consciousness. Something moves on the inside first, and the visible world runs behind it, and the distance between the two is where you have to live for a while. I mean that the way it sounds. I’m not offering it as a figure of speech, and I’m not going to soften it into psychology to make it easier to agree with.
I can feel and recognize something of myself in other people and something of them in me. The trick and the wait are reality catching up.
I also cannot show any of that to you using my co-worker. There is a completely ordinary explanation sitting right there, and it is a good one. People take a while to update their read on somebody. My behavior changed in ways another person could respond to over time. That account is finished. It doesn’t need anything from me, and I am not going to argue with it because arguing with it would mean I needed him as evidence. He is a whole person with a whole life I know nothing about. His reasons belong to him.
So, I cannot prove any of it. I can tell you the conversations got longer.
I make everything here the same way. I put it out before I know who answers, or whether anybody does.
If this one is worth something to you, the kitchen takes tips.
The trouble with the old version is that it works.
That is the thing nobody mentions when they talk about changing. Whatever you were doing before, you were doing because it got results. The managed version of you knows how to make people comfortable. It knows which parts to keep quiet, which face to put on, and how to get a friendly answer out of almost anybody. It is efficient. It has years of testing behind it. It will still work on demand tomorrow, exactly as it did yesterday. The new way of looking at life has no track record at all. You changed something real, and the world has said nothing back, and the old machinery is sitting right where you left it, still oiled, still reliable, still willing.
Here is the order I think it runs in, and none of it is fast. Consciousness moves first. That is the starting point, and it is the only part of the chain I have any real say over. Then the way I act changes, because somebody who genuinely sees a thing differently stops making the same moves without having to decide to. Then reality answers, last and slowest, on its own schedule. Every step is waiting on the one before it. That is the whole reason there is a gap to stand in.
The first step is the one that matters, and it is the one that looks the least like doing anything. I meditate, and I use hypnosis. Both of them put me in the present, where I can watch a thought go past without grabbing it or arguing with it, and what that does over time is take the need out. Not the wanting. The need. And once the need is gone you stop performing the version of yourself that is trying to get somewhere, and you start moving like the thing is already handled. That is the part I cannot explain properly. It is also the part where my actions changed without me managing them, and where reality started coming back different, a long way behind.
So, when somebody goes back to it, I don’t think that is weakness. That is a person choosing the thing that demonstrably functions over the thing that has so far produced silence. I have considered it.
And here is the part I have not worked out. Once you have seen that letting go can change what comes back to you, can it still be letting go? Something in me knows this move works now. I can’t tell you what that knowledge is doing in there. I’m not going to claim I have gotten clear of it, and I’m not going to claim it has ruined anything, because I don’t know either one, and I would be guessing at myself to say so.
I am also aware that a man publishing an article about no longer trying to be received is trying to be received. I don’t have a way around that one. I am doing it anyway, and you can hold that against the whole piece if you want to.
Some of this does not catch up. I want to say that clearly, because there is a version of what I’m describing that gets used to keep people quiet inside rooms that are hurting them. Some rooms do not answer. Some people never revise their read on you and never were going to, and the honest thing there is not patience. If that is where you are standing, none of this is instruction.
And I can only tell you this story because it turned. If my co-worker still ignored me, I would be creating something else, or nothing at all, and you would never have known there was anything here to tell you about. That is worth knowing about every story shaped like this one, including here, right now, in this article.
Which is part of why I’m writing toward one person now. A while back, Sew Psycho left me a comment, and I am going to hand it over the way they wrote it rather than tell you what it said:
“You have sparked some long-dormant creative part of me, almost as if you’ve issued a silent personal challenge that I feel compelled to meet.”
Silent. That is the word I keep going back to. I didn’t aim anything at them. I didn’t know they were there. I had been watching one relationship at work for a response, checking it the way you check something you’re cooking, and there was somewhere else entirely I wasn’t looking at, and I only know about it because they decided to tell me.
I don’t get to see where any of it goes. Whatever moved in Sew Psycho belongs to Sew Psycho, and the rest of it is not mine to know.
I had been reading the quiet as an answer. It was never an answer. It was just quiet, and I gave it the rest.
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