The Things We Hope Our Actions Will Say

I keep sitting with the kind of person who knows how to show up but does not know how to ask anyone else to do the same. The person who remembers everything. Handles everything. Makes themselves useful before anybody can decide they are too much trouble to keep around. There is tenderness in that. Real tenderness. But there is fear in it too. Writing CAPRICORN LOVE LANGUAGE stirred up questions about the difference between proving love and allowing love. Those things sound similar until you really sit with them. Proving love lets me stay busy. I can bring, fix, carry, solve. Allowing love means I have to become still enough to receive it. I have to admit that I need something. That part is harder. I understand why actions feel safer than words. Actions have weight. They leave receipts. Words can disappear five minutes after someone says them, especially when their behavior never learned how to agree. So yes, I believe in proof. But I am also thinking about what happens when proof becomes armor. When I do so much for the people I love that they never meet the part of me that gets tired. When I expect them to understand every feeling I folded into the work, even though I never gave those feelings a name. That is a lonely kind of devotion. Not because the love is missing. Because the translation is. I wanted to write toward that quiet place. The place where two people may recognize reliability in each other before they recognize longing. Where competence is attractive because it feels safe, but safety still has to make room for softness. What I want readers to know is this: being dependable does not mean you have to become unreachable. You are allowed to be the person who gets things done and the person who says, “I need you here.” You are allowed to want follow-through and reassurance. You are allowed to believe actions while still needing words. And if speaking feels clumsy, let it be clumsy. Love does not always arrive polished. Sometimes it clears its throat. Sometimes it stares at the floor. Sometimes it says the wrong thing first and has to try again. I think trying again is part of the language too. Right now, I am sitting with the idea that words do not weaken what our hands have already proven. The right words simply turn on the light. They let another person see the tenderness that has been working quietly in the room all along.