Loud Is Not the Same as Grown

The visible markers of growth are almost all performance markers. Speaking. Leading. Being asked. Being sent. If those are the scale, then a person can be twenty years into something real and still feel like a beginner, because none of it happened where it could be seen.

I want to offer different markers, and I want you to check yourself against these instead.

Can you be in a room where you are misunderstood and not need to correct it that day. Can you hold a question open for a season without forcing an answer that would let you stop thinking about it. Can you watch someone be praised for something you did and be genuinely fine, not performing fine, actually fine, by Thursday.

Those are load-bearing. The other kind are visible. Load-bearing and visible are not the same property and we have been confusing them for a long time.

I work with a lot of people whose nervous systems do not permit them to be loud, and I have watched them assume for years that they were spiritually immature when what they actually were was quiet, and tired, and further along than almost anyone around them.

Growth has a shape and the shape is not a stage. It is more like a root system, and the entire point of a root system is that you cannot see it from the surface and the tree falls over without it.

You may be much further along than you have been told, and measuring yourself with an instrument that was never built to detect what you have.