This week I stood in front of a room of women I’d mostly never met and talked about my sisters, my layoff, and the specific people who stopped calling me once I had nothing left to offer them. I was asked to speak on what we need to restore before the holidays. I said yes before I fully understood what “restore” was going to make me say out loud.
I’m publishing the talk here, mostly as I gave it. It felt hypocritical to stand in a room and tell these women that courage means letting yourself be seen, and then quietly keep this newsletter safe and polished, the way I keep most things. So. Here it is. Uncomfortable and all.
I asked the room to do one thing before I said anything else: think of one relationship. Just one. One that’s gone quiet. Not ended. Not blown up. Just quieter. Maybe you stopped reaching out. Maybe you still see the person but stopped saying what’s true. Maybe nothing dramatic happened at all. It just got quieter, one missed call at a time, until quiet was simply what it was.
Hold that person in your mind. I’m going to come back to them, and I’d like you to.
I didn’t start paying attention to quiet relationships by choice. I started paying attention when I got laid off.
Most days run on a kind of white noise. Eyes open, mentally rehearsing the day before you’re even out of bed. A podcast or a call on the commute. Then eight hours of go-go-go until you fall asleep still checking email on your phone. Then I was laid off, and all of it just stopped. No calls. No meetings. Nowhere to be. I lost access to the servers before I even thought to ask coworkers for their personal numbers.
Some of the silence that followed was simply people who no longer had a way to reach me. But some of it was something else, and it took me a while to be honest about the difference.
Being laid off can feel like more than losing a job. For me, being an immigrant made it feel bigger than that. Like rejection. Like proof I wasn’t good enough. Like I would never be “like them.”
That’s the place this piece comes from. Not a theory about relationships. A fact I learned the hard way: some of the people I thought I had a relationship with, I actually had a transaction with. I didn’t know the difference until the transaction ended.
I told the room I have three of those relationships. I’ll tell you about them too, because I suspect you’ll recognize your own version of at least one.
The first is professional. For a while, my phone rang pretty regularly with people who wanted something. A lead, an introduction, a way into a project. When I no longer had those things to give, the calls stopped. Not rudely, not all at once. A standing monthly breakfast I’d had for years started getting rescheduled, then stopped being scheduled at all. Everyone got “busy.” I was dropped. I don’t say that with bitterness. I say it because it taught me the difference between a relationship and a transaction wearing a relationship’s clothes.
The second is my sisters. I have six of them. We used to talk constantly. Somewhere along the way, politics started to feel like ground too unstable for some of us to stand on together, and rather than risk the fall, we just stopped hanging out as much. At first it was to give people space. Let the heightened emotions settle. But it got harder to talk, because of the minefield sitting between us. Nobody ever officially ended anything. No conversation closed it. It just got quieter. Fewer calls. No more impromptu dinners. Holidays that felt stilted, even when no one said why.
And the third you already know. The layoff. The people who went quiet there weren’t being cruel. Most of them probably never even noticed they’d gone quiet; they were keeping their heads down, hoping they weren’t next. But I noticed exactly who reached out and exactly who didn’t, and that list rearranged how I understood every one of those relationships.
Here’s what I wanted the room to sit with next, and what I want you to sit with too: silence does not always mean peace.
I told myself, with my sisters, that the quiet was healthy. We simply don’t talk politics, and that’s a boundary, not a wound. If I’m honest, some of it is avoidance wearing a boundary’s clothes. I missed them. We’re close. But some of us want to stand on one side and think it’s the other person who should be the one to cross the line.
With the people who disappeared once I stopped being useful to them, I told myself I didn’t care. But I replayed those conversations more than I let on. I’d land on a specific exchange and wonder. Was that ever real, or was I always just a resource with a name attached to it?
What remains unspoken doesn’t disappear. We just carry it into every interaction that comes after it.
That silence costs something else too. Every time I chose quiet over honesty, I was choosing to stay a little hidden. Hidden is safer. It just isn’t seen.
Being seen takes courage, and courage is the thing I talk about constantly in my work, in this newsletter, usually under the word visibility. Visibility lets people notice you. But being visible and being real requires vulnerability, and not everyone is comfortable with that, myself included, most days. We hope people will understand what hurt us without ever requiring us to say it out loud. But people cannot respond to a truth they were never given.
When I got laid off, I had a choice: go find another job and put myself back out there, or hang up my own shingle and do business development on my own terms. I did the second one, and I have zero regrets. I show people the messy parts now, not just the wins. Being strong and staying quiet used to feel like the same thing to me. I know now they’re opposites. The strongest thing I’ve done was let people see all of it.
So if being seen takes courage, what does that courage actually sound like? Not a grand gesture. Just an open line.
“I care about our relationship.” “I feel like something has changed.” “I don’t want to keep making assumptions. Can we talk about it?” Or as plain as: “How are you? It’s been a while. Are you okay?”
Reaching out takes courage precisely because you can’t control what comes back. You risk being misunderstood, or rejected, or hearing a truth you weren’t ready for. But courage was never the absence of fear. It’s deciding that the chance of clarity is worth the discomfort of starting.
I’ve had good, honest conversations with some of my sisters since then. There’s more to be said. I’m saying that part out loud, here, because naming the unfinished piece is its own kind of courage. Maybe more than pretending it’s already resolved.
The goal was never to show up with a perfectly rehearsed speech. It’s to open the door with honesty and care, and let whatever happens next actually happen.
Restoration, when it comes, doesn’t erase what happened. It changes what you have to carry forward. I reached out to a former supervisor. Not the person who laid me off. The one who never reached out afterward, either. It took me about a year, and I finally called ahead of a job interview because I wanted to know: if someone asked about me, would they say something good? When I heard their voice, it was relief and resentment at once. They told me they’d felt bad, that the company had treated them poorly too. They’d since moved on. I thought I’d feel vindicated. I felt hollow instead, if I’m honest. But that box is closed now. I don’t need to reopen it. I’ve come to believe that closing something, even without the tidy ending I thought I wanted, is its own kind of restoration.
But restoration doesn’t always mean reconciliation. Sometimes courage looks like the opposite of holding on.
We tend to associate courage with fighting for a relationship. It can also mean accepting that a relationship can’t be restored to what you remember, because it was never quite that in the first place. The people who only called when I was useful to them taught me this directly. I’m not restoring those relationships. I’m not owed an apology, and I don’t need one to move on. I spend my energy now on relationships that go both ways. And I know you know people who just take. I’ve realized I need to protect my own energy, so there’s more of me left for the people who actually matter. Letting go of the rest wasn’t failure. It was finally calling the relationship what it already was: something that had ended.
That said, letting go shouldn’t be the first escape hatch out of an uncomfortable conversation. It’s the honest conclusion you sometimes reach after you’ve listened, spoken, and seen clearly what’s actually possible. Not every relationship needs to be carried forward in its original shape for it to have mattered.
Now go back to the person you were holding in mind. What kind of courage does that relationship actually need from you? You may not need to repair the whole thing. The next step might just be opening the door. It might be closing it, with care instead of a slam.
I’ll be honest with you the way I was honest with that room: I haven’t finished this work myself. I still owe one sister a harder conversation than the ones we’ve already had. The one I carry the most resentment toward. This piece isn’t me telling you I’ve figured it out. It’s me telling you what I’m still learning while I do it, in public, which is somehow scarier than saying it into a room of strangers who’ll never see my family’s group chat.
Before you carry more into the holidays, decide what you’re actually ready to restore. Relationship-building, the thing I write about here most weeks, is about more than networking or staying visible. Sometimes the highest return isn’t a referral or an introduction. Sometimes it’s peace: the peace of knowing you reached out, the clarity of knowing where you stand, or the relief of finally putting down what you no longer need to carry.
The courage to connect isn’t only the courage to hold on. It’s the courage to tell the truth, listen with care, and let restoration take whatever shape a relationship can honestly hold. Even if that shape is smaller than it used to be.
Before your calendar fills up with everyone else’s version of the holidays, I hope you find the courage to restore what can be restored, release what needs releasing, and carry a little more peace into the season ahead.
Who’s the one person you thought of? You don’t have to answer that here. Just don’t lose the name.
