I was eleven when I first learned that some rooms have a ceiling built into their architecture, and you will hit it no matter how you enter.
Ms. Thompson taught fifth grade science with a face that never moved. She was my Homeroom teacher, as well… and for nine months of my life I dreaded every single alarm clock because of her. I don’t remember her ever smiling – not once, not even the automatic kind adults do at children out of habit.
One fine spring day in 1990, I handed her a report I had built out of ideas. They were real ones, ones I’d turned over in my head for days. They were possibilities I thought were worth writing down.
Ms. Thompson handed that report back to me with a critique I can still recite today: too philosophical. Not rigid enough. Not based in what science can see. The hypothesis is one sentence, not the entire paper.
What she meant, though she didn’t say it this way, was: the facts matter. The rest of you does not.
I have spent a long time since then meeting rooms shaped like that one. It’s not because people can’t see me – they see plenty. In fact, they generally crave more. It’s that what they see, when it doesn’t fit the shape they came looking for, gets handed back, corrected and cut down.
They edit it in-process, making it smaller so it fits inside what can be measured instead of allowing it to expand them into more of themselves.
If you’re reading this and something in your chest just tightened, you already know the room I’m talking about. You’ve stood in it more than once. Maybe it had a teacher’s face, or a parent’s, or a boss’s, or a friend’s – cold and stern, or worse, kind and confused, looking at you like you’d started speaking a language they respected but couldn’t translate.
You know the wilderness, but maybe you’ve only visited it. You go in for a season – a breakup, a diagnosis, a year that broke something open in you – and then you find your way back to the marked trail, back to the people who speak in facts and schedules and small talk, and you’re grateful to be there.
Some of us don’t get to leave. This is the difference I want to teach you, because it’s the one thing people who’ve only visited rarely understand:
The wilderness isn’t always a place you pass through on your way to healing. For some of us, it’s just where we live. It’s not a wound to close. It’s the terrain.
Here, the light is different. It’s sharper, maybe, or just more honest. It shows you things the well-lit rooms are built to hide.
You see the fear dressed up as certainty. The love that’s really control. The silence that’s really surrender. And once you’ve seen it, the seeing doesn’t turn off. There’s no dimmer switch on this kind of sight, and no one warns you about that part before you get it.
What almost nobody wants to tell you or admit is that this kind of sight is lonely on purpose, not as a punishment. The loneliness is the cost of being called.
People want sustenance from you – a word, a read on a situation, the thing you always seem to notice first – but fewer want to sit down in the dirt next to you and learn how and why you see it. So, you learn a rhythm:
Pour out, then withdraw. Speak, then go quiet. Love hard, then guard the well, because you’ve handed people the sustenance before and watched them walk off without ever once asking your name.
The loneliness shows up at strange hours. It’s there at 2 a.m. when your shoulders ache from carrying something no one else can see the weight of. It’s there when you count the people who almost understood. Not the ones who understood nothing – that’s easier to grieve.
No, I’m speaking of the ones who got close. The ones who asked one good question, then stopped asking. Their almost-understanding is its own particular kind of grief, quieter than rejection and harder to name.
If this is where you live too, I’m not going to tell you the ache goes away, because it doesn’t, and I don’t trust anyone who tells you it does. Below is what I’ve found instead of a cure.
Stop looking for someone to move in with you. Look for someone willing to visit often.
You will likely never find a person in your everyday reality who lives in your exact terrain. That’s the nature of this wilderness, and it’s mapped differently for everyone.
But you can find people who will come to the border again and again, who will learn a little of your language even if they never speak it fluently. Let that be enough. Don’t punish the visitors for not being residents.
Let the silence be worship instead of exile.
There’s a difference between the quiet that comes from being shut out and the quiet you choose because you’ve finally stopped performing for people who were never going to understand anyway. One of those will hollow you out. The other can actually hold you.
Find the others who live here, even if you only ever meet them for an hour.
They exist. They’re rarer than the visitors, and you may go long stretches without finding one, but when you do, something in you will exhale. Don’t rush past that person. Don’t let politeness cut the conversation short.
Remember Ms. Thompson wasn’t right.
The facts matter. She wasn’t wrong about that. But she was wrong that they’re all that matters – and you, like me, knew that at age eleven, before anyone had taught you to doubt it. The ideas, the possibilities, the things that can’t be measured yet still shape everything that can… those were never a defect in you. They were the whole point.
I still believe there’s Someone at the far edge of this terrain who built it on purpose, and put certain people here because they could survive its weather and, more than that, they could love the ones still lost in it. His name in my story is God.
I can’t prove that, or Him, to you, and I’m not going to try to dress it up as certainty. I can’t graph or chart Him. I can’t show you His face, except through my heart and the way I live my life.
More than anything, He is a hope I hold onto in the dark hours, and depend on always. I offer the idea of Him to you the same way – not as an answer, but as company.
You are not broken for living here. You were never meant to live anywhere else.
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