The Silent Weight of Familiarity.

I teach English to children and adults in China during my free time. At first, I thought it was a way of language, culture exchange, and making some extra cash. But recently, it has been more than that, a mirror showing me things about human nature, love, and even myself.

There’s one girl I tutor. She’s a prodigy: sharp eyes, quick answers, a glow that lights up the room. One on one with me, she’s invincible. She laughs, she experiments with new vocabulary, she dives into the lessons as if English were a playground. I leave the sessions feeling as though we’ve accomplished something magical together.

But then her mother sits in.

Her mother adores her, and she adores her mother. That love is evident. But the moment the mother is around, the energy dies. The little girl’s answers become softer, her giggles more contained, her vitality wrapped in as though she’s saving it for another time. The lively kid I know takes a step back, and in her stead is someone quieter, more reserved.

I did not give it much thought until the same thing happened again with an adult student.

She’s a married woman who wants to improve her spoken English. With me, alone, she’s radiant. She tells stories, she risks mistakes, she embraces corrections with courage and humor. Her voice fills the room with confidence. But when her husband joins us, everything changes. The sparkle fades. She chooses her words carefully, speaks less, smiles politely instead of laughing freely. It’s the same pattern I’d seen with the little girl.

Two people, two lives, and yet the same subtle transformation. And it made me stop.

I began to wonder: why does this happen? Why do people, when they are surrounded by those whom they love the most, on some days seem to lose their luster?

I reflected on my own life. There have been moments when I was alive, shining, and fully myself  but only in the absence of some people I loved. In front of them, though I wished to shine, I couldn’t reach the same me. Not because they meant to hurt. Not because they were not supportive. But because they carried a history of me in their eyes. Among them, I wasn’t just who I was then, I was also all my past mistakes, all my old habits, all my past versions.

And suddenly, I understood something.

This is perhaps the reason why so many people leave home. Why they pack up and relocate to cities where no one knows their name. Why they cross oceans, learn new languages, start over. It’s not always to run away from pain. Sometimes it’s to run away from memory. The people back home may love them very much but that very same love comes with a heaviness. The heaviness of familiarity.

When you’re in a new place, there are no old assumptions. No expectations. No “you always were like this.” There is only the here and now, and the possibility of who you can be.

Maybe that’s what my students feel with me. I’m a stranger, a new face. I don’t have any past with them. No background on who they were yesterday. And so, they are free, free to laugh with abandon, free to struggle through mistakes, free to show the parts of themselves that cringe beneath the eyes of the people who know them best.

And maybe, through them, I’m seeing myself.

We all long for love. But perhaps we long just as much for the freedom to be loved without the burden of past definitions. To be loved not only for who we used to be, but for who we’re still becoming.

The silent heaviness of familiarity is overwhelming, and yet, it can also be lifted. Sometimes by distance. Sometimes by time. Sometimes simply by the bravery to walk into spaces where new eyes look at us not as ghosts of yesterday, but as the alive, unfinished, developing souls we are today.

We don’t just want to be seen.

We want to be seen anew.

Fred Agaba