A Shared Knowing
I’ve been thinking about a scene I read recently in a book.
One character went with her friend to an AA meeting. She wasn’t ready to tell a room full of strangers about her own addiction, and what struck me was that she didn’t have to. No one seemed particularly interested in fixing anyone else. There wasn’t a rush to offer advice or find the right words.
They simply made room for one another. There was a shared knowing in the room.
I finished that passage and thought, What if we had more of this as women? Not AA meetings, necessarily. Not another organization to join or appointment to add to the calendar. Just safe spaces among women.
What would that look like?
Especially as we get older, by the time we reach middle age, we’ve lived some life. We’ve loved people and lost people. We’ve made decisions we were certain about and others we’ve questioned. We’ve watched relationships change. We’ve watched our children grow, our parents age, our bodies change, and our priorities shift.
Some of us have built careers. Some of us have left them. Some are wondering what’s next.
We’ve experienced marriages, divorces, friendships, loneliness, caregiving, disappointment, success, grief, reinvention and beginnings we never anticipated.
Our stories aren’t the same. But maybe there’s a shared knowing that comes from simply having lived long enough to understand that life is rarely as simple as it once seemed.
What if we brought that knowing into our relationships with one another? What if a woman could say, “My marriage is hard right now,” and we didn’t immediately ask what she’s going to do about it?
What if she could admit that caring for someone she loves is exhausting without feeling like she has to quickly add how grateful she is to have them?
What if she could say she misses the person she used to be without someone immediately reassuring her that this version is better?
What if she could question something she once believed without someone feeling the need to defend it?
What if she could grieve something that never died?
A friendship.
A dream.
A career.
A relationship that still exists but has changed.
The life she thought she’d have.
An earlier version of herself.
What if we didn’t need to determine whether her loss was worthy of grief? What if we just let her tell her truth?
I wonder how often our desire to help gets in the way of that. Someone we care about shares something difficult and almost immediately we begin searching for a solution.
Have you tried…?
Maybe you should…
Here’s what I would do…
We mean well. Sometimes advice is exactly what someone needs. Maybe we should let them ask for it, because sometimes she already knows her options. Sometimes she isn’t asking us to solve anything. Maybe she just needs somewhere safe to set it down for a minute.
And maybe that’s what holding space is really about. It’s not taking someone’s burden from her. It’s not convincing her that everything will be okay. And it’s not finding the lesson or pointing toward the silver lining. I think maybe it’s more about being willing to sit beside what is true, for her, in that moment.
I think sometimes we confuse being understood with having identical experiences. But shared knowing doesn’t require a shared story. I don’t have to experience your particular loss to recognize grief.
I don’t have to understand every detail of your relationship to recognize heartbreak.
I don’t have to have made the same choices to recognize uncertainty.
I don’t have to completely understand what you’re carrying to help you hold it for a minute.
Maybe being understood doesn’t always require someone to understand everything. Maybe it simply requires someone willing to make room for what is true for us.
Of course, if we want these kinds of spaces, we also have to be willing to create them. We have to become safe people. People who can listen without waiting for an opening to tell our own story. People who don’t compare pain. People who can be trusted with what someone tells us when she’s vulnerable. People who can tolerate a little silence rather than filling it with answers. People who can hear an experience different from our own without needing to correct it.
And maybe we need to give one another permission when life feels complicated. We can hold space for conflicting emotions, like when we love someone and feel angry with them. When we are grateful and exhausted. On the days when we love motherhood and still wonder who we are outside of it. Or when we feel confident and yet also uncertain. For the times when we may know what we want and yet we are still afraid of choosing it. Or maybe when we are healing and hurting at the same time.
Maybe part of creating safe spaces for one another is resisting the urge to make those contradictions more comfortable, because let’s face it, humans are messy, complex creatures.
I don’t know exactly what this kind of circle looks like. Maybe it’s a group of women gathered around a table. Maybe it’s two friends talking over coffee. Maybe it’s a phone call where someone finally says the thing she’s been afraid to say out loud. Maybe it’s sitting beside someone and realizing there really isn’t anything that needs to be said. Or, maybe the circle doesn’t matter nearly as much as what happens inside of it.
No fixing.
No competing.
No performing.
No requirement to make the story more comfortable for the people hearing it.
Just women who have lived enough life to know that sometimes there isn’t a right answer. Women who are willing to listen without fixing, to sit without solving, and share without comparing. Women who don’t need every detail to recognize the weight another woman is carrying.
I think this is shared knowing.
What if we could offer one another more of that? Not by finding more women who know how to hold space for us, but by becoming the women who know how to hold space for one another.
Much love,
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