They tell me I’m wasting my breath—picking at scars that should be hidden under sleeves. As if we are best served by silence, wearing smiles like masks stitched too tight, our eyes peering out like ghosts from behind glass. These are the ones who believe in tidy appearances, that betrayal and pain can be buried alive without consequence, as though our bodies aren’t still whispering the secrets of our hurts, humming the notes of pain under our skin.
But I’ve seen what happens when you bury it all. People say the past is over; yet, they wear it in the way they shrink from love, how they turn away from the raw, human need to be seen and heard. I’ve watched them dance their hollow steps, holding hands yet never touching, living in marriages that feel like locked rooms with no windows. What they don’t realize is that unhealed pain has a pulse of its own; it finds a way out—through anger, through numbness, through a perpetual restlessness that steals peace, minute by minute, year by year.
When you ignore what’s broken inside, you’re only layering soil over seeds that sprout when you’re least prepared. It grows in the shape of your unspoken words, in the betrayals you accept, in the grief you swallow and never digest. I’ve seen it swallow people whole, eaten alive by wounds they refused to name, by the ghosts of dysfunction they defended and nurtured like a secret garden. They call it strength, this denial, as if muting yourself were a kind of courage. But what it really is? A prison made of glass, where every feeling is muted, every relationship more like a performance than a communion.
To refuse to process is to choose numbness over life, to exist rather than to live. These people drift through the years with their hearts locked tight, too afraid of what might spill out if they dared to open the door. They think they’re safe, that they’re sparing themselves and others from pain. But they’re only bleeding inside, letting the slow poison of unprocessed hurt drip through everything, tainting love, friendship, even the bond with themselves.
So, yes, I dig into my wounds. I hold them up to the light, ugly as they are, because they are mine. I refuse to wear a mask that denies what I’ve endured. I would rather be scarred and whole than pristine and hollow.
B 🤍
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