Hi, thanks for taking my call. Do you have a bit of time? There’s something I need to say.

Let me just go to my bedroom so I have some privacy.

Are you still there?

Sorry about that.

As you know I always try to show up vulnerable, honest. This year however, I’ve realized I’m still hiding, from my feelings, my past, my truth. I’m so tired and I’m afraid.

This call to you has had me stressed out for months. Not being able to predict your reaction, not knowing what the outcome might be or how we build from here has had me frozen for weeks now.

Do you still want to hear this? Hold on, let me get my paper, I wrote it down to get the words just right because I’m not sure if I’ll be able to gather enough courage to say it all again.

Ok, here it goes.

​

This is not a story about resilience, this is a story about shame.

Too much. Too loud. Too dramatic. Too critical. Disrupter of the dynamic, feelings sharp, truths inconvenient. My voice, it seemed, always echoed back to me as something unwelcome. As if the way I felt was too jagged to fit in the world’s neat corners. So I folded myself smaller, again and again, until my voice became a whisper even to me.

I poured my need to be heard into acts of care and purpose, and for a while, found solace in this socially acceptable form of expression. When love came dressed as control it slowly eroded what remained of the fragments of my needs, until I forgot, I too had a voice. I stopped speaking, not because I had nothing to say, but because, I thought, no one wanted to hear it. I was silenced so many times I finally silenced myself.

But silence isn’t the end of the story.
It’s just a pause, a place where breath gathers before the next line.

A soft murmur grew deep inside me and slowly gained momentum. It erupted , a tormented howl.  It almost broke me.  For the first time in years, I listen, for me, to me. I don’t fill the silence with someone else’s needs. I listen not for answers, but for remnants of who I’d been.

My hands remember what my mind and heart has tried so hard to forget. Taking time, giving myself permission to feel, sifting through memories dusted with pain and nostalgia, to reclaim my voice, to embrace myself in all my imperfections.

I don’t always know if I’m slowing down, or if this is just another way to run, with softer steps.

My silence is not absence.

 It’s presence, on my terms.

Thread by thread, I will speak again.

​

Are you still there?

Can we talk about this?