I Didn’t Lose My Voice, I Buried It
They call it losing myself. I call it hiding him well enough to keep the room calm.
They say I lost myself.
No. I know exactly where I put him:
under my ribs, wrapped in apology,
pressed between my lungs so the words wouldn’t leak
and make the dinner table tense.
They taught me that being agreeable
was safer than being real.
So I practiced disappearing,
in every conversation that smelled like conflict,
in every room where my truth felt bigger
than their comfort could handle.
I didn’t lose my voice.
I folded it neatly.
I tucked it between the lines,
wrote it down instead of saying it,
called it discipline,
called it maturity,
called it survival,
because being silent looked so holy on me.
Funny thing about buried things:
they sprout in the dark.
Now that voice claws up my throat at night,
rasps at my teeth,
demands to be heard
exactly as ugly, exactly as loud
as I was told never to be.
They loved my neatness more than my noise.
They worshipped the tidy hush I nailed into my own chest,
never asking what it cost to keep the table calm
while my ribs rattled with unsaid things.
This poem is proof I never misplaced myself.
I knew exactly where I locked him:
behind my lungs, beneath apology,
like a sin I didn’t dare confess with everyone watching,
knives and forks clinking politely over my soft betrayal.
I learned young that disappearing was safer
than daring to be inconvenient.
Better to fold myself into silence
than force their comfort to look my truth in the teeth.
But silence is never burial,
it’s incubation.
A quiet tomb where the thing you called dead
grows fangs in the dark,
learns your pulse by memory,
waits for your courage to crack just wide enough
to crawl out hungry.
So if you see me loud now,
unapologetic, sharp-edged, mouth wide as a wound,
know I didn’t find my voice.
I unscrewed the coffin in my throat
and let him come screaming home.
I’m not sorry he’s starving.
I’m not sorry he bites.
He’s mine.
He always was.
This isn’t a return.
It’s an emergence.
What I hide away has claws now
and I’m finally letting it speak.
P.S.
If this stirred something in you,
it might speak to someone else too.
Feel free to pass it on.
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📚 This series will become my next book… Shadow Thoughts: The Silence That Kept Me.