PEOPLE WHO WERE GOOD TO ME

Letter 023 NEW

You Knew Before I Did.

You didn’t need every detail before deciding I deserved kindness.

I thought I was hiding it really well.

That's almost funny to me now.

Because apparently there were people looking at me thinking,

Something is wrong.

And I was still saying,

I'm fine.

I said it convincingly too.

At least I thought I did.

I went places.

I answered texts.

I worked.

I laughed at the right parts of conversations.

I showed up looking enough like myself that I thought nobody would notice how far away from myself I actually felt.

But you noticed.

You noticed when I got quieter.

You noticed when things I would normally have opinions about suddenly got an I don't care.

You noticed when I started explaining things that shouldn't have required explanations.

You noticed how carefully I chose my words.

How quickly I defended things nobody had accused me of.

How often I said everything was okay.

Maybe especially that.

You didn't sit me down and announce that you understood my life better than I did.

Thank God.

I probably would have argued with you.

Actually, I know I would have.

Because I wasn't ready for somebody to tell me what was happening.

I was still trying to make what was happening make sense.

Those are different things.

So you did something much smaller.

You asked questions.

Sometimes I answered them.

Sometimes I changed the subject.

Sometimes I gave you the version of the story I could tolerate telling.

And somehow you understood there was another version underneath it.

You didn't drag it out of me.

You just made it a little harder for me to keep pretending nothing was wrong.

There were moments when you would look at me for half a second too long after I said I was fine.

I hated that look.

Not because you were wrong.

Because some part of me knew you weren't.

I wanted you to accept the answer.

You kept accepting me instead.

There's a difference.

You let me come around in my own time.

You didn't make me prove anything.

You didn't need every detail before deciding I deserved kindness.

You didn't turn my life into something interesting to discuss.

You just kept leaving the door open.

I don't think I understood what that meant then.

When your world gets small enough, an open door is a very big thing.

And eventually, I started telling the truth.

Not all at once.

Nothing important seems to happen all at once.

First it was one sentence.

Then another.

Then something I had never said out loud.

Then something I heard myself say and immediately thought,

Oh.

Because sometimes you don't realize how bad something sounds until you hear your own voice describing it.

You were there for some of those ohs.

You didn't say I told you so.

You didn't need to.

You had known.

Not every detail.

Not every reason.

Not what I would eventually call all of it.

But you knew me well enough to recognize when I wasn't myself anymore.

I think about that now.

About how desperately I was trying to convince everyone that I was okay.

And how lucky I was that at least one person loved me enough not to be convinced.

I don't know whether I ever thanked you for that.

Probably not.

I was busy surviving the thing you had already noticed.

So this is me thanking you now.

For the questions.

For the look.

For not pushing.

For not disappearing.

For believing what I eventually told you.

For leaving the door open long enough for me to finally walk through it.

I thought I was hiding it really well.

Maybe from some people, I was.

But you knew me.

And somehow,

you knew before I did.