There’s something oddly exhausting about waiting for replies you know might never come. Not in a dramatic, life-altering way. Just enough to sit with you longer than you’d like. The kind of waiting where you check your phone without real hope, reread what you sent, and wonder if you said too much or, worse, not enough.

Most rejections aren’t loud. They don’t come with explanations or closure. They just arrive as silence. A message that goes unanswered. An email that never gets acknowledged. A space you showed up for sincerely, quietly hoping it mattered. And the thing about silence is that it leaves too much room for imagination, and imagination is rarely kind.

After a while, the waiting starts to feel familiar. You tell yourself not to expect much, yet a part of you still does. You wonder if following up would seem eager or, worse, embarrassing. So you don’t. You sit with the discomfort instead, convincing yourself that silence is an answer you should learn to accept gracefully.

For people who overthink, silence is never empty. It fills itself quickly with second-guessing, with imagined missteps, with the quiet fear that maybe you misread the moment entirely. Maybe you cared more than you should have. Maybe you misunderstood your place in someone else’s life. The mind is very good at turning a lack of response into a personal failing.

What makes these moments hard isn’t their scale. Individually, they’re small. Almost insignificant. But they add up. A message here. A follow-up there. An invitation that never comes. Over time, they start to feel less like coincidences and more like a pattern you’re afraid to name.

And yet, you still show up. You still send the message. You still offer your time, your interest, and your sincerity, knowing fully well that it might be met with nothing. That kind of softness doesn’t get talked about enough. How tiring it is to remain open in a world that often responds with distance, not cruelty, just absence.

Silence doesn’t end things abruptly. It stretches them out. It teaches you how to withdraw without anyone noticing. You begin to hesitate before caring. You learn to reply slower, to temper enthusiasm, and to prepare for disappointment before it arrives. Not because you’ve grown indifferent, but because you’ve learnt what usually happens when you hope.