When I was twenty, I spoke too carefully. I shaped my words like furniture in someone else’s house—useful, polite, easy to move if needed. I was living in a shared flat near the train station in Bern, where the walls were thin enough to hear someone brush their teeth but thick enough to keep their loneliness in.
I had just started university, and everything felt like a test I hadn’t studied for. Every conversation, every glance across a seminar room, every pause after saying something that maybe didn’t land quite right. I read too much philosophy back then, underlined too many things, tried too hard to sound like I knew what I was doing. But I didn’t.
One night, during a literature class, the professor asked us to speak about a passage—something about silence in a story by Dazai. I raised my hand, not because I had something meaningful to say, but because I was tired of listening to myself stay quiet.
When I spoke, my voice caught. Just a little. Like it had tripped on its own shoelace. The sentence didn’t flow. It felt jagged, too soft at the end.
No one said anything.
The room stayed still.
And I thought I’d failed.
But then the professor—he was older, calm in a way you can’t fake—nodded slowly and said,
“Yes. That’s it exactly.”
That was all. No praise. No spotlight.
Just a soft affirmation that I hadn’t ruined everything by speaking.
That maybe, even the words that come out uneven
still land where they’re meant to.
—
The Quiet Terror of Being Heard
At twenty, what made me nervous wasn’t rejection.
It was the possibility of being understood.
Of saying something so close to the truth that someone else would recognize it.
And what then?
What if they saw me?
What if I could never hide again?
But nervousness, I’ve learned, is not something to outgrow.
It’s something to walk beside.
A reminder that something inside you matters enough to risk.
It doesn’t mean you’re unready.
It means you’re awake.
—
Wabi-Sabi in the Half-Spoken Thought
Wabi-sabi is not just about the cracked bowl or the faded fabric.
It’s about the moment your voice falters but doesn’t fall.
It’s about the sentence that ends strangely
but still means something to someone.
It reminds us:
- You don’t need to speak perfectly to be understood.
- A trembling truth still holds weight.
- Even soft words can leave deep impressions.
- Sometimes silence is the second half of a sentence.
—
Now, when I speak—when I write—there’s still that hesitation.
That small echo of twenty-year-old me,
sitting in a too-bright classroom,
wondering if the room would forgive me for being real.
But I’ve learned to love the pause.
The unevenness.
The way some thoughts only find their shape after they’ve been spoken aloud.
Because maybe it’s not about saying it right.
Maybe it’s about saying it anyway.
And trusting that someone, somewhere,
is waiting to nod slowly and say,
“Yes. That’s it exactly.”
life 
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