An email from someone I work with says I'm not allowed to email someone else.

I don't need to respond. They've said their piece, and the easy thing is to let them have the last word. I respond anyway: "Let me be clear, I can email anyone I want related to this issue."

Full Send.

We're driving home after a date. It's the kind of evening that's supposed to close distance between us. Somewhere on the road I go quiet, and then I stay quiet. I couldn't tell you what the argument was about. Probably something small. What I couldn't name, in the moment, was what I wanted. I wanted someone beside me, looking at the problem with me, and instead it sits in the center consol space between us, riding home in the car.

My boss keeps asking questions. Explain this better. Break this down. I don’t understand. I know the details, and I can't seem to make them land. Frustration climbs, and finally it comes out of me like pleading.

"Just trust me"

Silence.

"I do trust you," my boss says. Then: "Alright. Let's break this down."

I've replayed these pauses a few times these past weeks.

Trust was never missing from the car or room. When it came to work, my boss had it the whole time, offered it in four words, and moved straight to the work. I was the one who was walking out of the conversation before I even opened my mouth.

That's what defending is and feels like. Like building your own blanket fort on the other side of the conversation. Like reaching for control when connection no longer feels like something you can trust. Sometimes the bond has already thinned, even if no one else has noticed. Sometimes the wound belongs to an older relationship, carried into a new room.

Someone who feels exiled can stand in a room full of connection and still hear their old wounds whisper:

“You don’t belong here.”

I know I’ve heard my brain say that before. And when belonging feels uncertain, control offers something to hold. It can give us the “right” words, the withheld words, the plea that might keep someone from leaving, or the hundredth attempt to explain what we NEED someone to understand.

The email, the silent car, the plea; each one was a wall going up where I wanted a door. And the walls were convincing. In the moment, they felt like clarity, like protecting something that mattered. I wanted to reach for someone. I reached instead for a way to solve a problem outside my own imaginary defensive blanket fort.

I like to think of a wedding. Two people stand at the altar facing each other, close enough to hear each other breathe. They say their vows. Then they turn and walk out hand in hand, and the whole world is in front of them, no longer between them.

Most of us spend our lives trying to get back to that walk. Same direction. Same side of the table. The problem, whatever it is, out in front where we can look at it together.

But when old wounds stir, we stop walking and search each other’s faces for proof that we are safe. We reach for control, asking our bonds to become a guarantee. Somewhere in that reaching, the person beside us becomes the person we have to defend against. A spouse, a boss, another team, even ourselves, becomes the problem to be solved.

I’ve found the way back begins with loosening that grip. Making room for a hand we can hold without knowing everything that lies ahead. Turning, together, toward the world.

There are rooms where I've asked for feedback and shown the meal I made. Just the meal, set on the table, with an open question about how it tastes. (If you missed last weeks Waymarker, Three Months for One Meal, you can read it by clicking here for the story behind that table).

There are other rooms where I've defended every ingredient. The pepper was necessary. The timing was out of my hands. The heat was too high. The recipe came from someone else. I wanted to try something new.

By the end of my defense I've explained everything and fed no one.

I've come to think the first is the harder thing to do. Showing the meal means someone might not like it. It means standing in the room while they decide. The old word for that is fortitude, and it has less to do with toughness than with staying put when everything in you wants to leave.

And then there's a quieter skill folded inside it. Call it the ability to sit in an unresolved moment without grabbing for the last word. The email didn't need my reply. The silence in the car didn't need to be broken by my version of events, and it didn't need my silence either. It needed me to say the true thing, which I couldn't yet find. I just needed connection and someone next to me.

Staying in the room costs something. You hear criticism you can't answer yet. You let a sentence hang in the air without defending it. You discover that some people don’t want to be in that room with you. And, most importantly, you discover that the sentence won't kill you.

Now this is the part that took me longest to see and work out.

When I said "trust me," I was asking someone else to hold something I hadn't picked up myself.

I was asking my boss for trust while I was shaky on my own footing. Unsure whether my work was sound. Unsure whether I could be corrected and still be okay. Unsure whether the people in the room believed me, or even wanted to solve the problem with me.

In my head, I was working through organizational design, belonging, and whether I could survive being misunderstood, again. On the other side of the counter, someone was waiting for me to order a number four.

“Sir, this is a Wendy’s.”

And there I was, asking for the combo meal to come with a guarantee that I mattered.

The plea was loud because the doubt underneath it was louder.

I’ve learned that someone else’s trust can’t do all the work of rebuilding my own. My boss offered his. But I was so busy asking for it that I didn’t know how to let it in.

I know that cell. It's the one I built inside my own head, with good locks and a convincing view of everyone else's mistakes, and I've sat in it long enough to know the door was never locked from the outside.

Self-trust seems to arrive in small acts, one at a time. Letting the other person finish, showing the work before it's ready, saying "I don't know yet" and then staying for the answer. Each one builds a little more trust in my ability to meet what comes next without putting up a wall.

I’m still practicing. Some days I show the meal. Other days I catch myself listing ingredients with my arms crossed. I call both progress. Catching myself is how I get another chance to choose.

That pause after “trust me” helped me see what my own defenses had hidden. The people who love me, and the ones who lead and want to serve alongside me, are often already on my side of the table. I’d been asking them to prove it while they were waiting for me to turn and look at the problem with them.

Turning toward it together was another small step on restoring togetherness.

More soon, from further down the path. Until then, keep wayfinding.