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There’s such a thing as speaking up and not being heard.

I had never really thought about it before, but now I get it. Speaking and being heard are completely different things. To speak up is one thing, the one thing we are told we are free to do, the one thing we are encouraged to share, the one thing that is somehow our fundamental human right. But to be heard, actually heard, not just listened to, but intentionally understood in the way you mean to be understood, that is something entirely different.

Because you can pour out the entirety of your heart and people would still hear what they want to hear. You could try diplomacy, and somehow rudeness would be picked out from between words you never said, you could explain yourself until you run out of ways to explain, and still walk away knowing nothing you said actually reached them.

You learn quickly that talking about it doesn’t necessarily help it. Talking about it doesn’t solve it, talking about it doesn’t make it disappear, talking about it doesn’t mean it’ll be fine, or that it’ll be understood, or that someone will suddenly see the thing you have been trying so desperately to make them see.

There’s this verse in Proverbs that says, “The heart knows its own bitterness, and no one else can share its joy.” I never really understood it before, but now I think I do. Only you can feel the things you feel, as deeply and as personally as you feel them. People can sympathise, they can listen, they can try to understand, but there are some sorrows that remain untranslated. Some things can leave your mouth perfectly formed and still arrive in someone else’s ears as something entirely different.

And maybe that’s the part nobody tells you.

Sometimes, speaking up is not the same as being understood, sometimes you can say everything and still not be heard, sometimes the words leave you, but the meaning never quite makes it across.

Dearest reader, we are often encouraged to speak up, to talk about it, to use our voices, and we should, but maybe we should also learn that being unheard does not mean we failed to speak. It does not mean we did not explain ourselves well enough. 

They just heard something else.

And maybe that hurts in its own peculiar way, because there is a loneliness in knowing that you spoke, and knowing that someone listened, yet still knowing that you were never really heard.

@favvy_Okwans🖤.