WORKING WITHOUT AN ECHO
By Clay Stafford
There are stretches when work and life carry on, yet the world goes strangely muffled, and I’m left facing a reflection I don’t repetitively acknowledge. The first time I became aware of this was after years of working in the collaborative arts of television, film, and theater, when, without those lively moments, without the noise, silence itself became its own uncanny yet welcoming mirror. To this day, the likeness I see unnerves me.
The experience I’m thinking of wasn’t dramatic. Nothing collapsed. Nothing extraordinary happened. I changed where I wrote. I was living in Los Angeles then, surrounded by the hum of other people’s stories. That was all. I was young. I switched employment and went from the noise of collaborative rooms to the hush of a rented space on my own. Nothing refashioned in my profession except the location and the environment. I kept doing what I promised, tending the responsibilities I chose, still delivering work, but without the usual affirmations. Where daily life had once been bustling, there were now no replies in hallways, no nods in breakrooms, no signs in studios that anything I was offering was reaching beyond my own effort. In the absence of feedback, I learned that the material I was writing and the life I was living were now without endorsement, and the meaning of things changed when nothing echoed back.
Without response, the work felt different beneath my hands. I still had the discipline to continue, but without reflection or resonance, I began to feel the dull ache of questions rising from somewhere older than ambition, closer to the ribcage: What is this for? Does any of this matter? Had I mistaken movement or activity for direction? It surprised me how much the small, ordinary reassurances had once steadied me. A single thank-you, a simple hurrah, being noticed in passing, none of it had seemed important at the time, but when it disappeared, I felt the floor shift a little. I realized how soundlessly I had leaned upon them.
What steadied me again wasn’t a surge of motivation or a sudden breakthrough. It was a kind of returning, almost like walking back to the trailhead after getting lost. I noticed that the reasons I began hadn’t dissolved just because no one was nodding along. The values underneath the effort remained, unchanged and unmoved. The silence hadn’t drained them of meaning; it had only stripped away the applause I didn’t know I’d been listening for.
Working without affirmation brought me face to face with a question I hadn’t needed to ask before: did the work matter only when it was witnessed, or did it matter even here, in secret, when there was no audience to gather the story? It was an uncomfortable distinction. There was no performance in that space, no cleverness, just me and the truth of what I cared about.
Staying with the work in that lonely townhouse on Bedford Drive, where jacaranda petals stuck to the windshield, wasn’t about mettle. It wasn’t about proving anything, not even to myself. It felt smaller than that, more silent. I continued because continuing felt more honest than stopping. The pull didn’t come from momentum or reward; it came from alignment, as if turning away would have been a small betrayal of something I couldn’t name.
In that hush, something shifted. It wasn’t confidence or inspiration. It was a steadier posture, days spent without waiting for an echo, returning without asking to be met halfway. There was nothing heroic or cinematic about it. I certainly didn’t feel that. I simply stayed.
Affirmation did come back eventually, and the validity of the choice I had made did come, though in indirect ways I couldn’t have predicted. By then, the ground beneath the work had already changed. It no longer asked to be seen to matter. The meaning of what I did through my work had moved inward, even to a place where applause, even though it later came, couldn’t reach it.
I once believed that meaning required an audience. Now I suspect that the audience only revealed what was true long before anyone clapped. When the echo disappeared, and I kept going anyway, the work stopped asking who was watching and started quietly telling me who I was. It was from there that I became.
Clay Stafford is a bestselling writer, filmmaker, and founder of the Killer Nashville International Writers’ Conference, Killer Nashville Magazine, and the Killer Nashville University streaming service. Subscribe to his newsletter at https://claystafford.com/.
