Wanting to be seen

Late one night I told someone something I’d been carrying. A story about hurting a person and not knowing how to apologize properly. About feeling guilty and frozen about it.

They gave me advice. Good advice, honestly. Have you apologized yet. Why does apologizing feel unnatural to you. You should learn to look inward. People forgive you when you get better.

Everything there was true. And I felt nothing except a deep sadness, like I’d been pushed away. That’s the part that confused me for days. They weren’t wrong about anything. They put real effort into it, at midnight. And it still landed like a door closing.

Eventually I worked out what happened. My question wasn’t really a question.

Advice assumes there’s a problem sitting in front of you and that the useful thing is to solve it. Most of the time that’s correct. But when someone opens up to you at midnight, the thing they’ve handed you isn’t a problem. It’s themselves. Solving is the wrong verb for that.

There’s something else in it too. Advice puts the two of you at different heights. One person has the situation, the other has the answer. Even when it’s generous, and it usually is, it’s a reply from above. You reach out with something soft and get back something competent.

What I wanted was for the other person to come down to the same level and be as exposed as I’d just been.

I’ve thought about what that would have sounded like. Something closer to: I know that feeling, I did something similar once and froze the same way, and the longer I waited the harder it got to say anything. And then a question that goes further in instead of toward a solution. So it’s not really about the apology, is it.

No advice. No “you should.” Just, I’ve been there too, and here’s me, open the same way you just were. I see you.

To meet an open heart you have to open yours. Nothing else substitutes, and a correct answer least of all.

I don’t think advice creates connection. I want to see people, and be seen.