Within 14.
on the difference between making room and disappearing
You don’t need to arrive anywhere while you’re here.
If you have a journal nearby, you may want to keep it within reach. A quiet corner can help, though it isn’t necessary.
Just enough space to notice yourself for a few moments.
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Within began as a small space for slowing down long enough to listen inward.
This reflective rhythm will deepen as new editions continue exploring the inner landscapes that shape our lives. This is part of that unfolding and will live within the paid space for those who want to keep returning here.
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I have spent a lot of my adult life learning that other people do not have unlimited access to me.
It was an important thing to learn. There are relationships that survive by convincing one person that exhaustion is generosity, that keeping the peace is more important than telling the truth, that being needed is the same as being loved. There are people who grow accustomed to your availability and experience any change in it as rejection. Learning to recognize these patterns can alter the course of a life.
I have been thinking about another truth that sits beside this one.
A life with other people in it will rarely remain entirely convenient.
Someone calls when you have finally sat down. A child needs help with something you have already explained three times. A friend tells you the same story again because apparently they need to tell it again. Someone you care about moves more slowly than you would prefer. An afternoon changes shape because another person is having a hard day.
These moments rarely arrive looking meaningful. Most of the time, they feel like interruptions to the life we had planned to be living instead.
I wonder how much of being in relationship with other people is built there.
We have become increasingly fluent in the language of protecting ourselves from one another. Some of us needed that language desperately. It gave names to patterns that had kept people depleted, afraid, and available far beyond what was healthy. It taught us that resentment can be information, that access can have limits, that saying no can preserve something important.
I believe all of that.
I also wonder whether we have enough language for the ordinary cost of having other people in our lives.
The inconvenience of another person’s needs. The patience required by someone else’s limitations. The plans that change because a person you care about is struggling. The time spent listening to something that matters more to them than it does to you. The hundred small adjustments involved in sharing a life, a family, a friendship, a workplace, a neighborhood, a community.
There is a difference between relationships that require you to disappear and relationships that require you to make room.
The difficulty is that both can cost us something.
We are often encouraged to pay attention to how people make us feel. Who drains us. Who asks too much. Who interrupts our peace. Who leaves us carrying more than our share.
There is wisdom here. Some relationships remain intact only because one person has been taught to endure what should never have been required of them.
But I wonder whether, in learning to protect ourselves from relationships that consume us, we can become suspicious of every relationship that costs us something.
Those are not the same thing.
A person can inconvenience you without exploiting you. A relationship can require effort without being unhealthy. Someone else’s needs can occasionally take precedence without your own needs becoming irrelevant. Reciprocity does not mean every exchange is equal by the end of the day. Sometimes one person carries more for a while. Then life changes, and the weight moves.
The question may be less about whether a relationship costs us and more about what the cost is producing.
Does it make your life smaller over time? Does it require you to betray yourself to remain connected? Does it depend upon your silence, fear, or exhaustion?
Or does it enlarge your capacity to live alongside another person whose needs, timing, limitations, and desires will never perfectly align with your own?
One cost erases a person.
The other reminds us that there is more than one person here.
