The Small Silences That Take Us Away From Ourselves

I keep sitting with the smallness of it. Not the feeling. The feeling is enormous. I mean the way losing yourself can begin with something so small nobody else would notice. A sentence you decide not to finish. A need you call silly before anyone else can. A smile placed over anger because the room already feels too tense. Nothing dramatic enough to point at. Nothing that sounds like a reason to say, “I am disappearing here.” And still, you are. Writing around Mira’s awakening stirred up that uncomfortable question in me: how many times do we call something love when what we are really practicing is endurance? I do not ask that with judgment. I think we endure because we hope. We believe patience will be rewarded. We believe love can translate what we are too afraid to say. We believe that being easy to hold will keep us from being dropped. But being easy to hold can become another name for making yourself small. That is the part I cannot stop thinking about. Not just the moment someone realizes they have gone missing from their own life, but the tenderness required afterward. Because it is easy to become angry with the version of you who stayed silent. Easy to look back and say, “You knew better.” Maybe she did know. Maybe knowing and being ready are two different doors. I want readers to know that awakening does not always look brave at first. Sometimes it looks messy. Sometimes it looks like grief, doubt, or staring at your own life and admitting you do not recognize it. Sometimes the first honest thing you feel is anger. Sometimes it is relief. Sometimes it is nothing because you have been numb for so long that even freedom feels unfamiliar. None of that means you are doing it wrong. I am sitting with the idea that returning to yourself is not one grand act. It is a collection of tiny loyalties. Saying what you actually want. Letting a no remain a no. Choosing not to explain your pain until it becomes acceptable to someone else. You do not have to hate who you loved in order to love yourself again. You do not have to turn your past into a courtroom. But you do have to stop leaving yourself there, still waiting for permission to matter. That is what I hope stays with you. You were never too much for wanting to be present in your own life. And even if you have been gone from yourself for a while, the way back is still open.