Silence Mistaken for Rejection

I spent years in professional settings being very good at producing things quickly so that the silence after them would not last very long. The speed was competence. It was also a way of not waiting. Waiting in silence was how rejection arrived in Sengera. You spoke. The adult went quiet. Then the thing that was wrong with what you had said arrived. So I learned not to wait. I learned to produce the next thing before the silence on the first thing could gather itself.

What I missed in those years was the quality of attention that some silences hold. The colleague who goes quiet before responding because they are genuinely thinking. The reader who takes three days to write back because they are sitting with what you wrote and do not want to respond casually. The patient who cannot speak for a moment because what you told them landed in a place that language has not reached yet.

That silence is the body paying attention. It is not withdrawal. It is arrival.

I wish I had known earlier that some of the most important silences in my professional life were not rejections. They were people taking me in, carefully, before they could say what they needed to say.

You have been misreading some of those silences. It is worth looking again.

— Job