View this post on Instagram

 

It begins the first time you were taught to hide yourself.

I was a little girl the first time I got in trouble for telling the truth.

I wasn’t being disrespectful or defiant—I was simply being honest. But I watched the room shift. The adults stiffened. Their discomfort said everything. That’s when I learned a lesson I didn’t have language for yet: telling the truth makes people uncomfortable. And discomfort gets you punished.

That was the beginning.

Not of the trauma itself, but of my reaction to it.

Not the explosion—just the first crack in the foundation.

It was the moment I learned that safety required performance. That my truth was too much.

I didn’t go silent. I went angry. Why? Because I was not honoring myself.

I fought with everyone. I carried rage like armor. I walked through the world like a clenched fist, pushing people away before they could hurt me. I was hiding in plain sight. And no one could see how badly I was hurting.

So I wrote.

I journaled instead of speaking. I cried in solitude because tears were a sign of weakness. I bled quietly onto paper because that was the only place I was allowed to be honest. I didn’t know it at the time, but that was how I survived.

Not by smiling and staying small, but by writing my pain into something that couldn’t reject me.

Trauma doesn’t always begin with a slap. It doesn’t start with the moment everything explodes.

More often, it starts long before—in silence, in confusion, in the moment you realize you have to choose between being loved and being yourself.

By the time I became a woman, I had already learned to filter myself for approval. I had perfected the art of hiding. And I made adult decisions from that wounded place—sacrificing my dreams, my voice, my worth—because deep down, I believed I wasn’t good enough.

I didn’t know it was a trauma response. I thought I was living my life day by day to survive through the pain.

I called it being realistic in a world of adults who knew what was right from wrong.

After all, this is what love was, right?

I didn’t think I was compromising myself.

But now I see what it really was: a lie I inherited and internalized.

A lie that whispered, you must earn love by disappearing.

And I believed it for far too long.

If you’re someone who’s just now realizing how much of your life has been shaped by pain you never asked for—this is for you.

You’re not crazy.

You’re not weak.

You’ve just been surviving in a world that taught you to betray yourself to be safe.

But you can unlearn that. You can begin again.

Here’s what I’ve learned on the road back to myself:

1. Trauma is subtle before it’s loud.

It doesn’t always look like crisis. Sometimes it looks like overworking, people-pleasing, or needing control. Look for the quiet places where you abandoned yourself. That’s where healing begins.

2. Familiar doesn’t mean safe.

What we call “chemistry” is often unhealed trauma. If you keep ending up in the same story, ask yourself: Who does this feel like from my past? That question alone can rewrite everything.

3. Self-betrayal is not love.

We’re taught to glorify sacrifice, especially as women. But love shouldn’t require you to bleed. If your peace is the cost of the relationship, it’s too expensive.

4. You’re not too much—you were just never fully seen.

You’re not hard to love. You were just raised around people who couldn’t recognize your kind of magic. That doesn’t mean you should dim it.

5. You’re allowed to choose differently—starting now.

You didn’t choose your trauma. But you get to choose your healing. You can leave old narratives behind and write new ones that honor the person you’re becoming—not the one you had to be to survive.

This is why I wrote Burnt Letters. Not to relive my pain, but to give it shape. To turn the unspeakable into something beautiful. To finally say, “This is where it began. But it ends with me.”

It’s a memoir about trauma, survival, and reclaiming the parts of ourselves we were once told to hide. It’s for the women who stayed too long. Who fought to be seen. Who are just now realizing they’re allowed to stop apologizing for taking up space.

Because not all wounds are loud.

And not all healing is graceful.

Sometimes it starts with a pen, a page…and the choice to finally stop hiding.

~