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{Note from the Author: This article is a reflection on the freedom we seek, the language we inherit, and the patterns that shape us.}
Some people learn the language of love long before they experience it.
Lucas was one of them.
When I read him, he could say the word beautifully—love, freedom, authenticity, presence, the I Am. He’d read enough, sat in enough rooms, listened to enough teachers that he didn’t sound fake. That was what made him hard to read.
Maybe he felt something. I don’t want to take that away from him. People can say love a hundred times and still be far from the actual experience of it. That’s not always hypocrisy. Sometimes it’s just distance—the word arriving years before the body knows how to live it.
I met Lucas at a spiritual retreat in Mount Shasta, the kind of place where everyone announces how blessed they are to be there and hopes the mountain will do the work they haven’t yet learned to sit still long enough to do themselves. He’d come, he said, to meet people on the same path. It sounded beautiful.
Maybe he meant it. But looking around, I couldn’t quite see what anyone was actually looking for. Everyone was carrying a version of themselves they hoped would be recognized as true. Do we ever really know the difference between the truth of who we are and the latest story we can tolerate about ourselves?
We don’t ever leave our first story. We take the whole house with us to our new city. Lucas had an story too. He fell in love in college. Lucas fell in love fast. He was a late bloomer, and Lucas’s childhood had required a lot of quiet holding together on the part of this boy. He was eight when his mother died after giving birth to a new baby. His father had been present at the birth, but was gone shortly after. As Lucas grew up, he became very useful to his father. He became the quiet one, the good one, the one who didn’t ask a lot of questions. This boy had a lot of grief in him, and no one to process it with. And so, as a child, Lucas learned that love required him to be very responsible.
He learned that silence was required of him. He even learned that not asking too many questions was required of him. And as Lucas grew into a man, this would remain his story. It would be the house that he took with him when he left to college. It would be the weight that he carried with him when he fell in love fast with this young woman in college. She would believe in him. She would build a life with him. And for a time, this would be just what Lucas needed.
But life has a way of not staying within the boundaries we hope to create. Lucas’s hunger returned, but this time it wasn’t for more success, for more of everything that would allow him to be the husband his wife deserved. Instead, he felt an insatiable hunger for more of self, for more space to grow into the man he was becoming. And he didn’t know how to explain that to the woman who had built her life around his.
The distance between them grew in small ways. A silence at dinner. A question answered too quickly. Two people sitting side by side on the couch, watching TV, but each lost in their own world. And the wife would reach for his hand, trying to hold on to him, and he would feel trapped. Maybe she didn’t know she was trapping him. Maybe she could feel him leaving, could sense the distance growing between them, before he even had the courage to say anything out loud.
It took some time for Lucas to find the words to describe his search for himself. He read a lot of self-help books and, before long, he had learned to speak the language of presence and of not being clingy.
However, presence is not a concept. Presence is a person who is sitting in front of you and staying there. Freedom is not a concept, either. It is the truth about what one can give and what one cannot. And most of all, it is honesty.
People want to be seen. But as soon as someone does see us, we immediately turn what has happened to us into a lesson. Being useful is not the same as being present. You can talk beautifully about freedom and still leave your partner in the dark about what you are doing and why you are doing it. The weight of your vagueness can be a heavy burden for the other person.
After many years, the marriage came to an end. Or perhaps it was just finally revealed to be what it had been all along. Lucas came back to the world of the living. He was born again. And so he had new people to talk to, new doors to open into new rooms that he had never entered before. He was discovering himself. Or so he thought. But often discovery and escape are dressed up in the very same garments. And we call it an awakening. But the person who is newly awakened cannot yet see that he has been escaping.
Beneath all that he had done for years there was a growing, unrelenting ache. The ache of a child locked in a room, calling for release. He was searching for someone who could put the many disparate parts of him together and say yes, I see you. He had no idea that the harder question he was trying to ask was what would happen if someone didn’t chase after him, if no one tried to possess him, if someone simply saw him? Would he feel peace? Or would he freak out?
For years the search for security had felt like a chase. And often, security had felt like exposure. It felt like the silence of a room where at last he could hear the child calling out from within. So he kept moving. Often he was moving away from the silence that another person’s love created.
Lucas wasn’t a bad man. That would be too easy to categorize. But searching, not knowing what he was asking of others, had hurt people. Until he met someone who played no preconceived roles with him. I didn’t try to rescue him from himself, and he certainly didn’t become my captive audience. Instead, he listened. And when Lucas felt seen by me he burst into tears and exclaimed how lonely he was. He said he didn’t care what the truth was going to cost him, but I hugged him anyway and he broke down.
But being seen can be terrifying when your whole life has been built around not being fully found. So he retreated into language again. Said he needed nothing, wasn’t looking for anything, was just curious.
Maybe he meant it. But then what was he asking someone else to hold—the tears, the closeness, the unfinished story he’d set down between them? It’s not enough to say, “I appreciate you.”
Your presence still asks something, even when your words insist it doesn’t.
Freedom isn’t the absence of definition. It isn’t keeping every option open, or showing up in someone’s life with real intensity and then hiding behind the word “curious.”
Freedom is being able to stand in your own life and say clearly: this is where I am, this is what I can offer, and this is where I have to stop pulling you into my confusion. That’s freedom not the poetry of staying open, but the responsibility of it.
The problem was never that Lucas had a story. We all do. The problem was that he couldn’t stand outside it long enough to see the pattern—the child, the seeker, the man who said he needed nothing while still walking toward people who could hold everything.
Underneath all those versions, someone was still waiting. Not another lover. Just Lucas, the one under the story, asking: am I choosing this, or just repeating myself in more beautiful language?
Maybe one day he’ll notice the same ache has followed him into every room, and understand that being seen was never an attack. It was an invitation.
Because sometimes the hardest person to meet isn’t the one standing in front of you. It’s the one inside you who’s been waiting, quietly, for years, asking you to stop turning your wounds into stories and just come home.
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