The Email That Started It All
My brother once sent me an email after years of silence. He hadn’t checked in during my worst days. Never called. Never asked how I was coping. But one day, out of the blue, he wrote to ask why I hadn’t shared my struggles with him. He ended the message with a neat line: “I hope you’re looking after yourself well.”
I stared at that email in disbelief. Here was someone who had witnessed my pain from the sidelines, who could have easily picked up the phone or sent a simple “How are you?” message, now making me responsible for the distance between us. But what cut deepest wasn’t his accusation, it was how he ended the email: “I hope you’re looking after yourself well.”
Hope that I was looking after myself well? I was drowning, barely holding on, and he “hoped” I was fine. It felt like someone tossing a paper umbrella into a hurricane and calling it help. That final sentence wasn’t concern. It was a tidy closing statement, a way to absolve himself without ever getting his hands dirty. It was the kind of superficial interaction that masquerades as care whilst requiring absolutely nothing from the giver. A simple “How are you feeling?” would have meant the world to me, but that would have required genuine curiosity about my inner world, real vulnerability, actual connection.
His email didn’t ignite anger in me, it unearthed a cold ache I’d long buried. I thought about all the times I sat in rooms filled with people who called themselves family, surrounded by noise but starved of warmth. They saw the changes in me. The fatigue that hollowed my eyes, the way my laughter grew quieter, less frequent. They saw it, and chose not to see it.
Surface Care vs Real Connection
But here’s what people like him don’t understand, silence teaches you. It teaches you who will sit with your pain, and who will only come around occasionally, looking to tidy up their conscience.
Superficial care is worse than neglect. At least with neglect, you know where you stand. But shallow concern? It plays with your hope. It pretends to be love. It taps lightly on the surface of your wounds, then leaves before the pain bleeds through. It leaves you lonelier than before, because now, you’re not just hurting, you’re made to feel ungrateful for not accepting the bare minimum as compassion.
Worse still, it belittles you. It quietly whispers that maybe you were the problem. That maybe you should have replied to their one lukewarm message. That maybe their single call, the one where they talked about everything except the things that mattered, was them trying. And because you’re already vulnerable from everything you’ve been through, that guilt finds its way in.
That’s the cruel magic of hollow gestures: they demand nothing from the giver, but everything from the receiver.
Performance Over Presence
Meanwhile, they boast. They glorify their ‘effort.’ To others, they become the concerned brother, the supportive friend, the present sibling. They sprinkle selective kindness like confetti and expect a parade in return. But only you know the truth. Only you know the silence behind their smiles. Only you know who was left holding the weight when everyone else walked away.
People like to post their good deeds, to wear their virtue like a badge. They plan. They talk amongst themselves, often with great enthusiasm, about how to fix someone. They come up with grand ideas, solutions, strategies, yet never once ask the most human of questions: “How are you feeling?” or “How can we help you, really?”
Instead, they reject your words, override your needs, and insist that their way is the best. There’s no space for your voice, only their narrative. “We did this, we did that, we’re fantastic human beings.” They broadcast their efforts like trophies. And somehow, you’re expected to be grateful for help you never asked for, given in ways you never needed.
The Illusion of Care
Care isn’t what people say about you to others.
Care is also not a habit that makes them feel good about themselves. Saying, ‘I call him every week because I care’ might sound thoughtful, but if those calls are filled with surface-level chatter, without any real effort to understand or truly see the other person, then what’s the point?
At the end of the day, you’re still the one sitting in the silence. Still the one feeling unseen. Because no one stops to listen. No one asks what would actually support you. They don’t want your truth, they want their version of a good deed.
It reminds me of the way wealthy countries pour money into poorer ones, calling it charity or aid. But instead of building up the people with skills and sustainable systems, they throw money and resources like confetti, because that’s easier, cleaner, and more self-congratulatory. It soothes the giver’s conscience, not the receiver’s condition.
The Discomfort of Truth
They don’t want your truth. They say they do, but the moment you speak it, raw, unfiltered, inconvenient, they flinch. They say things like, “Well, that’s your truth,” as if truth is only valid when it aligns with what they want to hear. As if your lived experience is negotiable.
And yet, for them, the truth is whatever fits their narrative. Their intentions, their actions, their self-image. Their version of events is cast in stone, whilst yours is treated like a passing emotion. Something to be corrected. Reframed. Discredited.
You start to realise that some people don’t actually want connection, they want compliance. They want the appearance of care, the illusion of virtue, but not the discomfort of real empathy. Because real empathy costs something. It requires sitting with someone’s pain without trying to control it. Without turning the spotlight back onto themselves.
When you tell the truth and someone brushes it off as subjective, it’s not just invalidating, it’s dehumanising. It tells you: your experience doesn’t matter as much as my comfort.
And so, you stop trying. You go quiet, not because you have nothing left to say, but because you’ve learned they were never really listening. They were only waiting to be right.
Trust: The Silent Casualty
And when your pain is reduced to a matter of perception, when your voice is treated like a problem to be fixed rather than a story to be heard, something precious begins to decay.
Trust.
That’s what it all comes down to. Trust is not just broken by betrayal. It’s worn down by repeated minimisation. By the absence of genuine care. By the rejection of your reality disguised as concern.
How can you trust someone who shows up only when it suits them? Who throws you lifelines made of words, not action? Who listens, not to understand, but to respond? Who hears, not your story, but the version they already decided was true?
The answer is: you can’t.
And so, slowly, you stop opening up. Not because you’re bitter. Not because you’re dramatic. But because you’ve learned the cost of misplaced vulnerability. Because you’ve learned that some people want the credit of closeness without the commitment to care.
Rebuilding Trust Through Real Connection
So yes, this is about trust. The kind that doesn’t ask for perfection, but presence. Not grand gestures, but quiet consistency. The kind that says, “I may not have all the answers, but I won’t turn away when things get uncomfortable.”
That’s the kind of trust I’m yearning for.
Care isn’t what people say about you to others. Care is not a weekly ritual that makes those doing it feel good. It’s not about pretending to see my perspective. It’s about walking with me as I try to understand mine. It’s not about whether I’m wrong and you’re right, but about the two of us resolving our differences through understanding and mutual respect.
Trust grows in the silence between those actions, not in judgement or performance, but in space, in patience, in real presence. I don’t need people to accept my truth blindly. But I do need them to genuinely stay with me long enough to understand it.
Because that’s where trust is born.
“Trust takes years to build, seconds to break and forever to repair.” - Dhar Mann
