#55: The Language I Never Practiced: Intimacy.

Independence taught me how to carry myself with grace. Intimacy is teaching me how to be carried without shame.

In Is My Independence a Fruit of Strength or a Shield from Intimacy?, I asked a question that felt like placing my own character on trial. I wanted to know whether the independence I wore so confidently was muscle or armor. After sitting with it longer than was comfortable, I have stopped pretending the answer is complicated.

It was both.

I have been my own safe space for as long as I can remember. I have sat in the discomfort of grief, the weight of joy, the tension of hope and the ache of sadness. I have learned the geography of my inner world so thoroughly that I can navigate it in the dark. When sorrow arrived uninvited, I made tea and endured it. When joy felt too big for the room, I swallowed it gently and carried on. When hope trembled like a fragile bridge, I crossed it alone and told no one how afraid I was of falling.

This body, this vessel, has carried me through every season. It has absorbed shock, metabolized disappointment, and steadied itself without leaning too heavily on anyone else. There is dignity in that. There is evidence of resilience in that. I will not diminish the strength it took to become the woman who can hold herself together when the world tilts.

But I am beginning to see that surviving alone and being known are not the same achievement.

If independence was the house I built with my own hands, intimacy is the decision to give someone a key. It is one thing to prove I can withstand the storm. It is another thing entirely to let someone sit beside me while the thunder is still loud. I know how to tidy my emotions before presenting them. I know how to convert pain into perspective before anyone can ask questions. What I have not practiced is letting someone witness the raw footage before the editing is done.

Learning intimacy feels like studying a language I once decided I did not need. I became fluent in self-sufficiency because it kept me efficient and protected. I did not have to risk misinterpretation if I never spoke my needs out loud. I did not have to face disappointment if I kept my expectations folded neatly away. Silence became my accent, and competence became my vocabulary.

Now I am standing at the edge of a conversation I do not fully understand, realizing that intimacy requires verbs I have rarely used. It asks me to say, “This is still hurting,” before I have shaped the hurt into wisdom. It invites me to let joy spill over instead of containing it so it does not inconvenience anyone. It challenges me to remain present when every instinct urges me to retreat into the safety of self-management.

Independence taught me how to carry myself with grace. Intimacy is teaching me how to be carried without shame.

This is not a rejection of strength. It is an expansion of it. The shield I built was not foolish; it was necessary for the chapters I survived but a shield held for too long begins to resemble a wall, and walls, no matter how beautifully constructed, still keep light out.

So this is my first deliberate step. I am loosening my grip on the idea that being low maintenance is the highest virtue. I am allowing the possibility that needing, when expressed with honesty, is not weakness but trust. I am practicing remaining in the room when vulnerability makes my voice tremble. I am learning to believe that being seen in the middle of the story does not guarantee abandonment.

I once thought strength meant never having to reach. I had pictured myself a watchtower and wondered; does the watchtower standing at sea ever grow tired of scanning the horizon? Is the sun permitted to rest for a day, or does it rise faithfully simply because that is what it was made to do? Now I am learning, I am not a watchtower, lol, I am just a lighthouse keeper; human enough to grow weary, yet faithful enough to keep lighting the lamp. So if independence built the foundation of who I am, perhaps intimacy is the open window that finally lets fresh air in.

Until next thursday.

Know you are loved.

Pherkeh.