People who are quiet are almost always misunderstood. They get labeled as cold or even worse, boring. As if being quiet is some kind of a personality problem instead of maybe just being quiet because they don't want to waste words on people or in situations that just don't get them.
But once you find someone who somehow allows you to loosen up, someone who makes everything you thought you knew about yourself look like normal and how it's really supposed to be, suddenly you're able to reframe yourself from what you thought was shyness to really just being selective. And that's an entirely different burden to take on.
Stories are not just inside of us waiting to be told. They need permission to be told. This kind of permission can only come from the right person, and it's usually unconsciously.
A laugh at just the right time or having someone be patient long enough for the message to be received, it will feel more like being paid attention to than waiting for someone to listen to you. That's all there is to it, that's the whole thing.
What there is to gain from hanging out with someone is not the warm and fuzzy feeling of being known. It's the incredibly weird feeling that there are versions of you that will never see the light of day. You could spend your whole life being the quiet one, the one who disappears and have never stopped to ask yourself whether or not your disappearing is your doing.
That is a really significant to acknowledge. If you realize that your boundaries are much more porous than you believed, that how you identify as a person can be different based on who is asking, then you should reevaluate how you move through the world. Whether or not you choose to do so is a whole other thing.
