or eleven years, I said nothing. Not to my sister, not to my mother, not to the closest friends I’ve ever had. I carried what happened to me the way you carry a stone in your chest — constantly, exhaustingly, invisibly. People would ask how I was doing and I would say “fine.” And every single time I said it, a piece of me believed less in the possibility of ever being anything more than fine.
“The silence wasn’t protecting me. It was completing the work that my abuser had started.”
What happened to me is not unusual — and that is the most terrifying part. At twenty-three, in my second year of university, someone I trusted used that trust against me. The details are mine and I choose to keep them that way. What I want to talk about is what came after: the decade of learning to live inside a body that felt like a crime scene.
The Cost of Staying Quiet
People assume that staying silent is a choice made from weakness. I want to dismantle that completely. The silence was, for a long time, the only thing keeping me functional. It was a survival strategy. If I spoke, I would have to feel it. If I felt it, I didn’t know if I would survive feeling it. So I built walls. Brilliant, architectural walls. I became very good at performing my life.
The cost was enormous. I dropped out of a PhD program I loved. I ended relationships before they could begin because intimacy felt like an ambush. I developed anxiety so severe that some mornings I could not leave my apartment. I told myself these were separate problems. They were not separate problems.
The Crack in the Wall
Three years ago, a friend sent me a link to Unmuted. “You don’t have to post anything,” she said. “Just read.” So I read. I spent three weeks reading, and something extraordinary happened: I started to recognise myself. Not in every story — but in the feeling underneath the stories. The particular loneliness of a secret. The complicated grief of a life partially unlived.
“Ididn’t think anyone would care. I was wrong. Spectacularly, beautifully wrong.”
I submitted my story at 2am on a Tuesday in October, shaking so badly I could barely type. I chose to stay anonymous. Within forty-eight hours, fourteen people had written to tell me that they saw themselves in my words. One woman wrote: “I thought I was the only one who described it as a stone in my chest. I’ve been carrying mine for nineteen years.”
What Voice Actually Feels Like
I am not healed. I want to be clear about that because I think the mythology of recovery is its own kind of silencing — this idea that there is an endpoint where you arrive and everything is resolved. There isn’t. There are better days and harder days. There is therapy, which I now attend every week. There are moments when the stone feels lighter, and moments when it doesn’t.
But I have my voice back. And having my voice back means I can ask for help. It means I can say “I’m not fine” when I’m not fine. It means I can sit in a room with other people who know exactly what it feels like to lose a decade to silence, and I can look at them and know that I am no longer alone.
If you’re carrying something you’ve never said out loud — I am not going to tell you it’s easy to speak. It isn’t. But I will tell you this: the silence is lying to you. It is telling you that your story doesn’t matter, that nobody will believe you, that you’ll break something irreparable by speaking. None of that is true. I promise you. None of that is true.
