The Space Between What I Said and What You Heard

I’ve been thinking about how fragile communication really is.

How rare it is to feel that unmistakable click of yes — you got me.

We walk around imagining it’s happening all the time, that it’s natural, inevitable.

I speak. You hear.

You speak. I hear.

But what if that’s the illusion?

What if most of the time, we are not hearing each other at all — we’re only hearing ourselves in the echo of the other’s words?

The sender–receiver model — that neat little diagram I learned years ago — still comes to mind sometimes. A sender encodes a message. A receiver decodes it. Between them: noise.

But that “noise” isn’t just a bad connection or background chatter. - It’s the accumulation of a lifetime.

Noise is the way my upbringing shaped the kinds of questions I feel safe asking.

It’s the subtle shift in my voice when a topic feels charged.

It’s the layer of meaning I add to your words without even realizing I’m doing it.

Noise is your tiredness at the end of the day, my choice of phrasing that lands differently because of something that happened to you ten years ago.

By the time my words leave me, pass through my filters, cross the space between us, and pass through yours — they are no longer the same words I thought I was sending.

This is why conversations can become minefields even when we love each other.

I can speak with care, and you can still hear something that feels sharp.

You can speak with tenderness, and I can still feel accused.

It’s not that we’re careless. It’s that we are carrying the entire weight of our histories into this moment — and we’ve trained our ears to listen for certain notes, to brace for certain blows, to seek out certain reassurances.

And then there’s framing.

We don’t come to a conversation empty-handed. We bring the lens we’ve been polishing for years.

If my frame says, You don’t really hear me, I’ll collect evidence for it without trying.

If yours says, I’m failing you, you’ll hear judgment even in my gentlest feedback.

Our frames can be compassionate or condemning, wide open or impossibly narrow — but either way, they shape the conversation before a single word is spoken.

Sometimes I think about how the ceremonial model of communication — the one we wrote about recently — feels like an antidote to this.

A slowing down. A stepping into shared space where the goal isn’t to win, or defend, or prove, but to discover.

In that space, I can hear not just the sound of your words but the world they come from. I can let your sentences breathe before I fill them with my own meaning.

It’s a different kind of listening — one that asks me to choose you over my story, at least for a moment.

But it’s hard, isn’t it?

Because sometimes we are scared. Sometimes we are tired. Sometimes the ache to be understood feels so urgent we can’t give the other person the time or space to get there.

And sometimes the ceremonial space is broken not by malice, but by habit.

The habit of rushing.

The habit of assuming.

The habit of protecting ourselves before we’ve even been hurt.

And yet, there are moments — rare, but unforgettable — when the noise drops away.

When the past steps aside.

When the frames dissolve.

And we meet each other as we are in this moment, without the weight of everything that came before.

It can happen in a single sentence. A single breath.

It feels like both of us have put down our armour at the same time, even if just for a moment.

The words become more than sound — they become a bridge we built together.

I want more of those moments.

I want to live inside conversations where the point isn’t just to exchange information, but to be changed by what we’ve shared.

Where listening isn’t just about catching your meaning, but about letting myself be moved by it.

Because the truth is, we can talk all night and still miss each other completely.

But when we really meet — when we really communicate — even silence feels like understanding.