Learning to Stay With Others

For a long time, I believed silence was something you endured privately. Something you carried on your own, the way people carry grief or doubt when they don’t want to burden anyone else.

This made staying harder than it needed to be. Silence felt isolating. Like a test I was failing quietly while everyone else moved on.

Silence feels heavier when you think you are the only one holding it.

It changed for me the first time I noticed how often people stayed without announcing it. They didn’t arrive with certainty. They didn’t agree on language or belief. They simply remained in the same space long enough for the pressure to ease.

We didn’t talk much in those moments. That was part of the point. Conversation tends to rush ahead of honesty. Silence gave us permission to stop trying to be interesting or impressive.

I began to understand that staying is not only an individual act. It can be shared without being organized. Witnessed without being explained. Held without being fixed.

Belonging does not require agreement. It requires presence.

When silence is shared, it changes shape. It becomes less accusatory. Less personal. It stops asking whether you are doing it right and starts offering something steadier — permission to be unfinished together.

We began to sit the same way. At the same time. In the same places. Not because it was sacred, but because it was familiar. Familiarity did more for us than insight ever had.

I noticed that the urge to leave softened in these moments. Not because anything had resolved, but because leaving no longer felt necessary to survive the quiet.

Silence shared is silence made bearable.

Earlier, I thought staying meant endurance. Something you proved by lasting longer than your doubt. But with others, staying felt less like effort and more like consent — a quiet agreement not to disappear just because nothing had changed.

We didn’t call this faith. We didn’t name it at all. Naming would have narrowed it. What mattered was that we kept showing up without demanding progress from one another.

This was new for me. And I didn’t yet understand why it mattered so much. I only knew that silence no longer felt like something I was failing alone.

You do not need to stay by yourself. Silence does not require solitude to work. Sometimes it becomes livable only when it is shared.