viewThere is a certain strength that comes from learning how to protect yourself. But there is an even greater strength that comes from realizing you were never really protecting yourself at all… you were shrinking.
Making yourself smaller on the outside while carrying entire worlds within. Watching everything. Noticing everything.
You become so familiar with pain that you can recognize it in other people without them ever speaking a word of it. You learn how to read a room before you enter it. You know who feels like safety and who feels like danger. Who carries warmth and who carries harm.
You become so good at seeing what others hide that it unsettles anyone who gets close enough to catch even a glimpse of you. And when they do, you run.
But what happens when someone feels familiar in all the right ways? When every instinct tells you to leave, yet something in you wants to stay even for just a little while.
And somehow they are so much like you that they bolt first.
A deep understanding between two people who never gave themselves a chance because fear arrived before trust ever could. Yet they remain connected in ways neither of them fully understands. The kind of ways only visible to those who have spent so long broken that they can no longer look away from what is real.
It’s the kind of understanding that is rarely spoken, but deeply felt. The kind that sits beneath every conversation, every silence, every goodbye.
And maybe that’s what makes it so terrifying.
viewSome teach you things. Others force you to learn things on your own.
Like a child left out in the rain without a coat, eventually you get sick from being cold for too long.
Abuse disguised as protection. Protection from who? From what?
When outside felt safer than inside, although outside came with its very own abuse and being far away felt more peaceful than being close, even though closeness was all you ever wanted.
Maybe that’s why you did what you did. Why you accepted what you accepted.
Abuse disguised as protection in such devastating ways that the mind fogs it over just to survive. It buries the truth, softens it, hides it from itself. Until one day it begins to untangle. Piece by piece, everything returns.
And it always seems to happen later. Later, when you’ve already lost so much. Later, when there’s no railing left to grab onto, nothing to keep you from falling. The truth finally arrives, and you’re left standing in the wreckage of everything it took to uncover it.
But that’s where the beauty begins. In the truth.
viewPain is only believed when it performs according to expectations. Suffering that interrupts narratives, is seen as deception. Not because it lacks evidence, but because it disrupts order. People confuse clarity with honesty, forgetting that exhaustion erodes language before it erases reality. Discomfort produces doubt faster than evidence produces belief, and those who need the most care are often asked to prove this best. Belief is granted to those who remain palatable, who soften their pain so it is easily digested. What cannot be consumed politely is rejected. And somewhere in all of this, belief ends not where truth falters… but where inconvenience begins.
viewBut what are you supposed to say? Where do you even begin? How do you explain something that has lived inside of you for so long that you’ve built an entire life around not speaking it?
How do you tell people that the mask was always just a mask? That the smile was practiced, the strength they admired was survival and that everything you’ve done to keep moving forward has contradicted the truth so deeply that if it ever slipped out, it would sound like a lie?
They take what isn’t theirs and leave you carrying the weight of it. They invade every corner of who you are until there’s so little of you left that you’re afraid to let anyone get close enough to see it. Close enough to hear it.
They teach you to question yourself. To doubt your memories, your feelings, your own truth. And after a while, the silence becomes its own kind of home.
So you become guarded. Not because you want to be but because it feels safer. You build walls so high that nothing can get in. The problem is, nothing can get out either.
But still, you love.
God, how you love.
You give pieces of yourself away even when you’re running on empty. You keep showing up. You keep trying. You keep hoping that one day someone will see past the walls without tearing them down.
But the damage lingers. It follows you into every relationship, every conversation, every moment where someone gets too close. And sometimes the fear is so much louder than the truth that you push people away before they ever have the chance to stay.
Because when you’ve spent years hiding the truth to survive, there comes a point where you don’t know whether you’re protecting it, or protecting everyone else from it.