The Version of Me That No Longer Wants to Hide

I keep sitting with the difference between privacy and hiding. Privacy feels sacred. Chosen. It is the room inside me where I get to close the door and hear my own thoughts before the world starts giving them names. Hiding feels different. Hiding is when I already know what is true, but I keep swallowing it because somebody else might not like the taste. Writing around the heart of VEIL OF SECRETS: The Witch Within stirred that up for me. The ways we are taught to dim what burns brightest. The ways silence can be praised as grace when really it is fear. The ways a woman can disappear inside everybody else's comfort and still be told she is doing such a good job. That last part gets me. Because sometimes being easy to love means people are only loving the version of you that asks for nothing. The version that understands every excuse. The version that keeps her knowing quiet because she does not want to seem dramatic. I am sitting with how often intuition arrives without a speech prepared. It does not always explain itself. Sometimes it is just a tightening. A pause. A small voice saying, this is not for me. And then the mind comes in with its clipboard and starts demanding evidence. What I want readers to know is that reclaiming yourself does not always look powerful at first. Sometimes it looks awkward. Sometimes it looks like changing your mind after you already said yes. Sometimes it is crying after setting a boundary because the boundary was right, but the grief is real too. Becoming whole is not neat work. There are parts of us that learned hiding was protection. I do not want to shame those parts. They kept us safe in the ways they knew how. But safety can become a cage long after the danger has passed, and eventually we have to decide whether we still need the lock. I am not interested in becoming fearless. Fearless feels like another impossible performance. I am interested in becoming honest. Honest about what I know. Honest about what I want. Honest about the places where I have made myself smaller and called it love. Maybe lifting the veil is not one dramatic moment. Maybe it is a hundred quiet choices to stop leaving yourself behind. That is what I am holding close right now. Not a perfect becoming. A true one.