Hidden Shell

Please don’t ask me to be quiet.

I have spent to long

learning how to disappear

inside my own voice.

I’m tired.
Tired of shrinking truth
to make others comfortable,
tired of swallowing words
that were never meant to stay buried.

They lower voices
when truth begins to breathe –
like even air must ask permission

to exist.

“Don’t make trouble,”
they say,
as if silence were peace
and not a locked door
with no windows.

You call it peace,
this silence you hand me as if a gift,
but I know what it is.
I’ve lived it.

Stories curl inward,
small animals hiding from daylight,
taught that survival
means staying unseen.

And asking an abuse victim to be quiet
is just another echo
of the harm we survived.

For me,
for so many of us,
speaking is healing.

It is saying the words out loud
so they stop living only
in the dark.

It is naming what happened
so it no longer owns us.
It is release.
It is breath.
It is moving forward without chains made of silence.

It is refusing

to feel our bones cracking

with the weight of silence

and shame.

It is protection,
for ourselves,
for the ones who come after.

Tell me ….
would we be here now
if someone before us
had spoken sooner?

Maybe.
Maybe not.

But I know this:
We speak
because we never want another soul
to carry what we carried alone.

So please,
don’t ask me to be quiet.
Not now that I finally have a voice.

If it unsettles you?

Cover your ears.
Step away.
Build distance.
Fly to the moon, if you must.

But me?

I am done being small.
I am done being silent.

I will be louder than silence has ever been.

I will rise.
Not rooted in fear,
and not buried in shame.

But soaring,
through the freedom of open skies ….
Speaking my truth,
until no one else is left voiceless on the ground.