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- Tone deaf or tone dumb?
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Hey friend!
Earlier this week, I opened my inbox and saw a message that made me stop scrolling.
It said,
“Stephen… sometimes your stories hit so deep I don’t even know how to reply.”
At first, I smiled.
Then… I kind of froze.
Because instead of feeling proud,
I caught myself wondering…
Wait… am I connecting?
Or am I missing something?
Is my tone landing the way I think it is…
or am I drifting into something I can’t hear from the inside?
Either way…
That one line sent me down a little spiral of self-reflection.
I started looking at my writing from this past week.
The drafts.
The notes.
The half-written paragraphs.
And to be totally honest with you…
There were moments where I wasn’t writing from my heart at all.
I was writing from habit.
From pressure.
From “sound right” mode.
And once I saw it, I couldn’t unsee it.
Have you ever read something you wrote and thought…
“Wow… this doesn’t even feel like me”?
Yeah.
That was me.
But here’s where it gets interesting…
As I kept reading through the messages people sent,
I realized they weren’t asking for perfection.
They weren’t asking for polished tone.
They were asking for presence.
For truth.
For something human enough to sit beside them when their own thoughts get loud.
And that was the part I had drifted from without noticing.
Crazy, right?
You spend so much time trying to sound “right”…
that you forget people connect to what’s real, not what’s perfect.
Want to know the little moment that snapped me back?
Yes?
Okay… lean in a bit…
It was when someone wrote,
“I don’t always know how to respond…
but please don’t stop writing like this.”
That line reminded me that tone isn’t something you craft.
It’s something you feel.
Something you return to.
Something you soften into when life gets loud.
So let me leave you with this gentle invitation:
Write about a time your tone carried a truth your words didn’t say out loud.
You don’t have to send it.
You don’t need to shape it into content.
You just need to name it.
Till tmrw,
Stephen
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