I see you

Last night, I sat in the dark again.

No noise. No answers. Just the steady ache of questions I dared not say aloud in the daylight.

Who am I without applause?

What remains of me if I strip off every mask I’ve ever worn just to be accepted, invited, liked?

Would anyone sit beside the trembling version of me—the raw, uncertain, uncurated me—if they saw past the filters and the bravado?

Or would they leave?

It’s easy to perform strength when the room is full of people clapping and watching. But in the quiet, when it’s just me and my soul… I realize I’ve spent so much time building the version of me they’d stay for… I forgot to ask if I’d stay for her too.

And the silence—it wasn’t just still. It was consuming. Deafening.

It almost swallowed me whole.

Almost.

Because in that suffocating stillness, when shame wrapped around me like a second skin and identity felt like it was unraveling—I heard something else. Or maybe… Someone else.

Not a shout. Just a whisper.

“I see you.”

“I know you.”

“And I still want you.”

Not the performance. Not the polished parts. Not the “best foot forward.”

But me.

The doubting, questioning, hiding, weeping, trembling me. The one curled in the corner of a dark room begging for permission to be more than a shell.

He saw her.

He sat with her.

And not for a moment did He flinch.

You see, the love of God doesn’t depend on the masks we wear to make others comfortable. It’s not deterred by our ache, our fragility, or our most honest questions.

It is not afraid of the dark.

And I am learning—slowly, painfully, beautifully—that maybe the silence wasn’t trying to swallow me…

Maybe it was trying to strip me.

Of the false versions.

Of the need for applause.

Of the counterfeit comforts.

So that I could finally hear the truth that doesn’t come with performance:

I was loved before I was liked.

I was chosen before I was approved.

I was known… and still wanted.

So here I am, raw and reverent, trembling and told:

I am not forsaken. I am not forgotten. I am free.

Even in the dark.