What Silence Costs…

Silence has a weight. It settles into your bones, into your breath, into the spaces between who you are and who you pretend to be. For years, silence was the safest choice I had. It protected me from questions I wasn’t ready to answer, from memories I wasn’t ready to face and from a world that didn’t know how to hold stories like mine. The few people who I ever shared my story early on found it too hard to deal with so I stopped sharing.

But silence also has a cost.

When you don’t speak your truth, you learn to live around it. You build a life that looks whole from the outside, while carrying fractures no one can see. You become skilled at smiling, at performing strength, at being the version of yourself that feels acceptable.  That is acceptable to everyone else. You become someone who can survive anything - but not someone who can heal.

Silence cost me connection. It cost me trust. It cost me the ability to fully inhabit my own life without feeling like a visitor in it. It cost me years of pretending that what happened to me was something I could simply outrun. And years of trying to fit into a world that could never understand my pain.

Writing Somebody Else’s Life was the moment I stopped paying that price.

Speaking the truth didn’t erase the past, but it freed me from carrying it alone. It allowed me to breathe differently, to stand differently, to live differently. Silence may protect you for a while, but truth is what sets you free.

This journal is where I honour that freedom - and the courage it took to claim it.