Liked, But Not Known: On Justin Brown and the Witness That Comes First
Fellowship Essay | by Thomas Lee Abshier, ND 8 May, 2026
Veg Out: Loneliness Essay, by Justin Brown
A friend forwarded me an article this week from VegOut by Justin Brown, a writer based in Singapore, on a particular kind of loneliness — the kind that lives inside lives that look full from the outside. I want to commend it to the fellowship before I respond, because Brown sees something clearly that the church often does not see, and he names it with a precision I find pastorally useful. The piece is not long; it would be worth your time to read it before you read this.
Brown opens the article with a forty-one-year-old woman he calls Maya. She runs a small design studio in Lisbon. By her own count, she has on the order of sixty close friends. On her last birthday, forty of them sent her messages. She read each of them on the balcony, was touched by them, and then sat with the phone in her hand and tried to recall the most recent occasion on which she had said something honest about herself and the other person had followed up with a real question. The recollection refused to come.
That, Brown says, is the loneliness this article is about. It has nothing to do with how many contacts are in the phone.
What Brown sees rightly
I want to honor three things he sees before I add anything to them.
The first is the diagnosis itself. Loneliness, Brown argues, does not come from having no one around you; it comes from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to you. That is a real definition of a real condition, and it is more accurate than the cultural assumption that loneliness is a function of the volume of social contact. On Brown’s account, the right test is not the number of contacts in your phone. The right test is the question of whether anyone you currently know would register a difference if a slightly less-present version of you walked through the next week’s worth of social engagements. Most people, he says, would not. Most of us have been polite for too many years to leak.
The second is his developmental account. Somewhere around age nine or ten, Brown observes, certain children figure out that the most reliable route to being kept and welcomed is to make oneself easy. They settle into a role in the family — perhaps the cheerful one, perhaps the responsible one, perhaps the child who never gives anyone trouble — and they receive an immediate, durable, positive return on it. Adults relax in their presence. Other children include them. The reinforcement does not stop, and they do not see what is being exchanged for it. What that child is in fact learning, without naming it, is to trade legibility for likability — to construct a self that is pleasant for others to be around, at the cost of a self anyone could come close enough to actually know. The bill on this trade does not arrive for decades. From the outside, the child looks like a successful person. From the inside, there is the slow, almost-unnoticed sense that the version of oneself everyone seems to like is the version that needs nothing — and a self that needs nothing is a self that nobody ever has reason to come closer to.
The third observation is about households. Emotional neglect, Brown points out, almost never resembles what the word neglect conjures. The houses where children grow up unheard are usually pleasant houses. They are not abusive. They have routines, holidays, family meals, and adults doing the best they know how. What is missing is not warmth and not provision; what is missing is the question. What do you actually think? What is actually going on with you? Some homes simply have no place in their conversational economy for that question. Others have a place for it, but only for one or two people in the family, and the rest of the household runs on logistics and humor and the inherited assumption that everyone is fine because no one has said otherwise. The child raised in such a house is, in Brown’s apt formulation, loved on paper and unseen in practice. By adolescence, they have stopped offering their inner life to the household. By adulthood, they have lost much of their access to it.
I have sat across from that adult many hundreds of times in my medical practice. Brown’s description is clinically accurate. The presentation is exactly as he describes — extraordinarily acute at reading what other people are feeling, almost entirely cut off from what they themselves are feeling until the disconnect has accumulated into exhaustion. They come in for a physical complaint, and the complaint is real, but underneath it is the long, quiet exhaustion of having been polite for forty years.
Brown’s prescription, finally, is also right as far as it goes. The people who actually emerge from this kind of loneliness do not, on his observation, do so through grand reinvention. They begin instead with a single relationship, on a single low-stakes matter, by venturing one slightly more honest answer than they ordinarily would, and watching the other person’s response. The response is informative either way. Some relationships, Brown notes, are quietly built on the agreement that neither party will ever require deep candor from the other, and those relationships will not survive the moment one party deviates from the agreement; that loss is real, but it is also a way of seeing more clearly which relationships had been carrying real weight all along. What endures is usually a few people, sometimes only one, sometimes a person who, it now becomes apparent, has been quietly hoping for years that the other would speak more truthfully and did not know how to invite it.
The question Brown stops at
This is the point at which I want to add something rather than push back.
Brown’s article is honest in a way most secular writing on loneliness is not. He does not pretend that the volume problem is the real problem. He does not promise that an app or a club or a self-improvement regimen will fix it. He names what is actually missing — the presence of a person who registers the inner life, who notices when something said on one occasion is still going on under the surface a few days later, who does not need a crisis to ask how the other is really doing — and he is right that the absence of that figure, more than the absence of social contact, is what the data on chronic loneliness is actually tracking.
But Brown stops, I think, one question short of where the diagnosis presses.
Why does the loving, ordinary, reasonably functional household so reliably produce adults whose social worlds appear full while their inner worlds appear empty? Brown answers: because the household lacks the conversational register for the question that matters. That is true. But it is a description of the symptom, not of the cause. Why does it lack the register? Why do even loving parents, doing the best they know how, fail so reliably to produce children who feel known? Why does Brown’s diagnosis fit so many millions of people in homes that the parents themselves would describe as functional and warm?
The answer the Christian tradition has offered for two thousand years is that human beings, including loving ones, have a corrupted capacity to see one another. The Fall did not abolish love within families; it limited the range of what love within families can do. The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it? (Jeremiah 17:9). The verse is usually read as an indictment of the wicked. It is more honestly read as a description of the universal predicament. Even the people we love, we do not, finally, know. Even ourselves, we do not, finally, know. The capacity to be a fully adequate witness for another person — to carry forward, days later, what they confided earlier, to ask the follow-up question, to hold what they actually think — is limited, in every household, in every marriage, in every friendship, even the best ones.
Brown’s prescription — find one person who can do this for you — is real, and it works to the extent that the one person you find has sufficient capacity to do it. But that capacity is finite. The one person can die. The one person can move. The one person can be tired on the day you needed the follow-up question. The one person can, eventually, fail you, not from malice but from being a creature in the same predicament you are.
This is not a counsel of despair. It is the observation that horizontal witnessing, however valuable, is not the bottom of the matter. There is a deeper question Brown does not quite ask: is there anywhere a Witness whose capacity is not finite, who does not forget, does not move, does not get tired on the wrong day, does not finally fail?
The Christian answer is yes, and the answer reorders the rest of the question.
The Witness that comes first
O Lord, thou hast searched me, and known me. Thou knowest my downsitting and mine uprising, thou understandest my thought afar off. Thou compassest my path and my lying down, and art acquainted with all my ways. For there is not a word in my tongue, but, lo, O Lord, thou knowest it altogether. — Psalm 139:1-4
Read that slowly. The Psalmist is not asking to be known. The Psalmist is already known. The knowing is in the past tense — thou hast searched me. The knowing is total — every thought, every word, every path, every lying down. The knowing is interior in a way no horizontal witness can match — afar off, before the thought has formed in language. The knowing is unembarrassed by darkness — yea, the darkness hideth not from thee (verse 12). The knowing is older than the person — for thou hast possessed my reins: thou hast covered me in my mother’s womb (verse 13).
This is not poetry merely. The biblical witness is consistent and not subtle: the believer is fully known, prior to any horizontal relationship that may or may not develop the capacity for partial knowing. The very hairs of your head are all numbered (Matthew 10:30). Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee (Jeremiah 1:5). Then shall I know even as also I am known (1 Corinthians 13:12).
This changes what is happening when a person sits on the balcony with forty birthday messages and feels invisible. It is true, in one sense, that nobody who sent those messages knows her. It is also true, in a deeper sense, that the One who made her knows her completely, has always known her, knew her in her mother’s womb, and knows the thought that has not yet formed into language as she sits with the phone in her hand. The horizontal absence that Brown rightly diagnoses is real. The vertical Presence is also real, prior, and not contingent on the development of any one human relationship.
People who know — really know, not as theological furniture but as lived foundation — that they are already known by God become, in my pastoral observation, dramatically more capable of being known by other human beings. The terror of legibility, which Brown rightly identifies as what drives the trade of legibility for likability in childhood, is partly the terror that the real self will be seen and rejected. If the real self has already been seen by Someone whose seeing is total, and the response of that Someone is not rejection but love and pursuit, then the stakes of horizontal legibility drop dramatically. You can risk a small, low-stakes piece of honesty in front of a friend — admitting you found a difficult conversation harder than you said you did, naming a disappointment you had been pretending not to feel — because the worst-case outcome of that risk, being unknown by that particular friend forever, is no longer the foundational fact of your existence. The foundational fact is that you are already known, and loved, and held, by the One whose witnessing is the ground under all other witnessing.
The false self that has to die
Brown’s developmental account — the early-childhood exchange of one’s deeper self for the more easily acceptable surface — describes, in secular psychological language, what the contemplative Christian tradition has called the formation of the false self. Thomas Merton wrote about this at length. So did Henri Nouwen. So, four centuries earlier, did John of the Cross.
The false self is the self assembled under conditions of relational scarcity, made of compensations and survival strategies, calibrated to remain acceptable to whichever caregivers were available. This is significant in that it has done real work in keeping the person alive in a household where the inner life had no welcome — but it is not the self God made. The self God made is the true self, and the true self has been there all along, behind the compensations, recognized by God before it was visible to anyone else.
The Christian gospel, in its anthropological form, is that the false self does not have to keep running the life. Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new (2 Corinthians 5:17). Paul’s old man and new man language is not a metaphor for moral improvement. It is a description of an exchange — the false self is laid down, the true self is raised. This is not therapy. It is more radical than therapy. Therapy at its best can help a person see the false self for what it is and grieve what was lost in its formation. The gospel offers a death and a resurrection — the false self does not have to be incrementally renovated; it can be put down, and a self older and truer than the false self can be received.
Brown does not have language for this exchange. The closest he gets is his observation that recognizing the loneliness is, in the short term, worse than not recognizing it — the in-between period of two or three years during which a person knows exactly what is missing but has not yet found it. The Christian tradition has a name for that period, also.
The dark night and the gospel meeting
John of the Cross called it the dark night of the soul. It is the period in which the false-self compensations have lost their power to satisfy, but the true self has not yet been received in its place. It is, as Brown describes it, a different and lonelier kind of solitude than what came before, because the previous loneliness at least had the cover of unconsciousness. Now the person sees, and cannot unsee.
This is not a problem to solve away. It is, in the contemplative tradition, the moment when the gospel meets a person at depth. When the false-self machinery has lost its grip, but the new identity has not yet been fully received, the soul is in a peculiar kind of openness. The horizontal witnesses Brown rightly recommends are part of what comes through that openness — but so, more fundamentally, is the discovery that the One who has known the person all along is present in the openness itself. The Lord is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart; and saveth such as be of a contrite spirit (Psalm 34:18).
In Christ in Gethsemane, we have the canonical image of this. He is alone with the cup. The disciples, whom he asked to watch, are asleep. The horizontal witness has failed. And yet he is not alone — not as I will, but as thou wilt — because the vertical witness is present. The Father is the one who knows him at the depth at which the disciples cannot. The hour is endured because the deeper knowing holds when the surface knowing does not.
What I want to say to anyone in the in-between period Brown describes — the lonelier-than-before stretch — is this: the work you are doing is not arbitrary. The willingness to see what is missing, and to refuse to numb it back into invisibility, is the work that makes you available for the witness you have always had and may not have known you had. The horizontal witnesses Brown rightly recommends will come, in their measure — perhaps a partner, perhaps a sibling, perhaps a friend whose depth you had never had occasion to discover. They are real, and they matter. But they will not be the foundation. The foundation is older than they are.
Crescendo
Brown’s article works toward, and stops at, the threshold of a verse. The verse is Paul’s, in 1 Corinthians 13, the chapter on love. He has been describing love that is patient, kind, not envious, not puffed up. He has said love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Then he reaches for the eschatological horizon:
For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known. — 1 Corinthians 13:12
Even as also I am known. That clause is the answer to Brown’s question. The future hope of the Christian is not merely to know other persons fully, but to know them in the way one is already known by the Person who made them. The full mutual knowing is the eschaton. It is what marriage at its best gestures toward without ever quite achieving. It is what fellowship at its best gestures toward without ever quite achieving. It is what every birthday balcony’s forty messages cannot deliver. And it is coming.
Already, in the present age, the believer is known. I am known. Paul does not say I will be known; he says I am. The full mutual face-to-face knowing waits for the resurrection, but the asymmetric knowing — God’s knowing of the believer — is present tense, already in force, the foundation under everything else.
This is what I would offer Brown, if he ever read this, and what I want to offer the fellowship to sit with. He has diagnosed the loneliness clearly. He has prescribed the right horizontal medicine — start telling the truth in one specific relationship, accept the clarifications, and find the few. The medicine is real. But the foundation under the medicine, the thing that makes the medicine survivable when the one person you found turns out to be tired on the wrong day, is the prior fact that you were already known before you ever risked telling anyone the truth about yourself.
The forty messages on the balcony are not the bottom of the matter. The bottom is that the One who made Maya was sitting with her on the balcony, in the only sense of with that finally holds. Brown is right that she should risk telling the truth in one specific relationship. He stops one move short of the deeper invitation: she does not have to manufacture the courage out of nothing. She is held by a Witness whose holding does not depend on her becoming legible to anyone else first.
That changes what telling the truth is. It changes what loneliness is. It changes what known means.
Sources
Justin Brown, The loneliness of being liked but never known, VegOut, May 5, 2026. (Original URL on the VegOut website.)
Internal Renaissance Ministries references: founders_vision/260430_three_level_stronghold_framework.md (the patterns established in childhood as quiet strongholds); CFE_christos_fellowship_essays/essays/260506-loosening-the-spell-lifting-the-yoke.md (companion essay on Stephen Grosz and the work of being seen and held).
Scripture references in this essay are King James Version: Psalm 139:1-4, 12, 13; Psalm 34:18; Jeremiah 1:5; Jeremiah 17:9; Matthew 10:30; 1 Corinthians 13:12; 2 Corinthians 5:17.
Contemplative-tradition references for the false-self / true-self frame: Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation; Henri Nouwen, The Inner Voice of Love; John of the Cross, The Dark Night of the Soul. These are not engaged in detail in the essay above but are the tradition the language draws from.