In the past years, two teachers I trust* repeated something that has been turning in me for days now:

“You live inside you. You do not live out there.”

One of them added something more precise: that when we feel something in another’s presence, we are not absorbing their feeling. We are reacting, inside our own skin, to an energy we’ve encountered. The art, she said, is not to act on that reaction, but to notice it.

I wanted to believe this cleanly.

Then I remembered an interesting experience.

A little while ago, I sat with someone, sharing something private — not a decision, not even close to one, just the shape of how I tend to find my way toward a process about a piece of work I’m writing. They interrupted me. What I was describing, they said, sounded untrue to them, like I was forcing myself into one narrow mental way of working when I didn’t need to. They have an intuitive gift, by their own account and others’.

I did not ask for a reading. I was simply talking.

What I felt in that moment had a name I didn’t reach for until later: invaded. Not because they were unkind — they weren’t, and I don’t think they knew — but because something that was only ever mine, my own private, unfinished process, had been told back to me as if they knew it better than I did from the inside.

I smiled. I said something gracious. Fawning my way through the discomfort. I didn’t say the true thing, which was: you don’t have access to this. Nobody does, from out there.

I mastered the art of not saying the true thing in the moment whenever it feels unsafe in my body or mind. I’m so good at it that no one in the room noticed anything had happened at all. It has saved my life on several occasions in dangerous situations. But this was like an old demon friend suddenly popping up uninvited with an important invitation to feel through it once again.

The grief arrived later, in pieces.

First, as irritation. Then, days on, as something closer to its real size: a lump in the throat I recognized from a long time before this particular person, this particular afternoon. The lump of being told what is happening in me by someone standing outside me: a mother who overrode a need before I’d finished stating it, a former partner whose listening had a price attached.

The names change. The shape of the wound doesn’t.

What I had to sit with honestly: even a real gift — and I’m not contesting that they have one or not — does not cross the membrane between one person’s interior and another’s. It can register something. It cannot register what is actually happening in someone else’s body, history, and present moment, all at once, the way that person registers it from inside. An ability is not a window. It’s still a read, taken from outside, run through someone else’s own filter, and often handed back dressed as fact.

Another person close to me sometimes does something similar, in their own way, though with more tenderness, and I find myself wondering whether it works the same way underneath. They’ll meet someone, and something in them responds almost instantly, forming itself into a clear sense of what’s true before there’s been time to think it through. What arrives afterward, I imagine, doesn’t feel to them like interpretation, but more like simple perception, truth plainly seen, offered as guidance.

In the language we both use to think about these things, that part of them is active but unconscious — reliable in its own way, but not something they can watch happening from the inside, the way I sometimes catch myself doing with my own thoughts. If that’s right, it wouldn’t be that they’re choosing certainty over uncertainty. They just may not be standing where the step between a read and a belief is visible at all.

I noticed, sitting with both of them, that I had started narrowing: needing to land on a conclusion, needing certainty, when uncertainty has never been the problem for me. It’s the most comfortable place I know. I think I picked up some of that fixedness, the way an open window picks up whatever wind is moving through the house that day. Not because anyone did anything to me. Just contact, doing what contact does to something with no wall there yet.

Underneath all of it was an older question, one I didn’t expect to find again so soon: am I ever going to be known, actually known, not read, not theorized about, not corrected by people more confident than accurate, by anyone standing close enough to matter?

As a 5th-line Personality, I have built a life, in part, around the fact that the only place this has happened with any reliability is on a page. Written down, a thing can’t be misremembered into someone else’s authorship. Someone can still misread it, take it somewhere I never meant, but the words themselves stay exactly as I left them, recoverable, unlike a spoken moment that only survives in whatever someone else’s memory does with it afterward.

I used to think that ache was about credit.
It isn’t, really. It’s about the much older, much rawer thing underneath credit: wanting to be accurately seen at all, by someone, anyone, without having to translate myself first.

And here is where it actually turned, this time.
I don’t think I need that anymore.
At least, not the way I used to.

What I want now is simpler and stranger: to keep saying what wants to be said through me, without needing anyone to trace it back to me for it to count. A seed doesn’t need the gardener’s name attached to grow. Most of what any of us offers lands quietly in someone, gets forgotten as a source, and becomes their own thought a year later. That used to feel like erasure. Today, it mostly just feels like how things actually move between people.

What I have now that I didn’t have a few years ago is somewhere to come back to that isn’t contingent on any of this. Not one person’s certainty, not another’s gift, not whether either of them ever fully arrives at the kind of solid ground I’ve spent real years building under my own feet.

I have someone to return to in the empty room.
Me.
That is really something.
Some days, it’s the only floor in the house that holds.

It is still hard, though, near people who haven’t built that floor yet (solid enough), to remember I’m standing on it. I notice myself closing, narrowing, needing to be sure, needing to be seen the way I needed it long before any of this.

Then I notice that I noticed.
That’s the whole practice, most days.
Not arriving. Just catching myself mid-reach, and coming back in.

You live inside you.
I’m slowly starting to see my lived truth in that.

—

(*) Thanks to Leela and Dharmen Swann-Herbert for their years of teaching and guiding