Shadow Thoughts: The Silence That Kept Me

Not a tidy book. A collection of unpolished poems and confessions, spilled raw, one weekday at a time. Born from the parts of me that learned too young that silence was safer than screaming.

Some wounds learned early
that screaming didn’t save them.
It only made the quiet sharper,
the punishments subtler,
the love colder.

So they folded themselves into compliance.
Into politeness.
Into “No, really. I’m fine.”

And I wore that softness like armor,
thinking if I bled politely enough,
maybe they wouldn’t notice I was bleeding at all.

This is not your tidy Sunday self-help.
It’s not a voice telling you to calm down
or think happy thoughts.

This is a book being born
from the parts of me that never got permission
to say what they needed to say.
The raw nerve of everything I swallowed
to keep their comfort intact,
even as it split my ribs open from the inside.

The yes that left a scar deep enough to wake you at 3am.
The whispered no’s that should have rattled the walls.
The soft smile that cost you your softness.
The rage that hums behind your grin while you type “No worries!”
The apology you were trained to give for simply existing.

One poem.
Every weekday.
Unpolished. Undressed.
Unashamed to be unpretty.

Each piece is a loose page,
scattered first here,
before they bind themselves together
as Shadow Thoughts: The Silence That Kept Me.

You’re reading the book
as it writes me back into my own voice.

You’ve ever bitten your tongue so hard
you forgot the taste of your own truth.

You know how to shrink without thinking,
how to fold your need into a polite nod,
how to make your rage sound like an apology
just to keep the peace no one ever kept for you.

You called silence your shield,
your discipline,
your safety,
when really it was your sentence,
the prison you built with your own good behavior.

You crave a voice that says the thing you’re still
too polite,
too loyal,
too terrified to name.
You crave words that don’t flinch,
a mirror that doesn’t lie,
a permission slip to stop performing survival
and finally admit: you’re still bleeding.

If any part of you read this and felt the lump in your throat
good.
You’re in the right room.
Stay.

I don’t know when this will wear a spine and a barcode.
I don’t care.
Right now it’s alive… feral, soft, bleeding clean onto your screen
whether I want it to or not.

One poem at a time.
One confession at a time.
Until the silence forgets how to keep us docile.

You’ll get every raw piece I was too obedient to say out loud,
Monday through Friday.
No small talk.
No curation.
No pastel positivity.

Just the truth, still warm.

This book is coming.
When the silence decides I’ve bled enough,
when the last hidden word claws its way to daylight,
when the wound and the pen agree that nothing more needs to be buried.

Until then,
come sit in the dark with me.
Come tear the stitches out, slow and honest,
thread by thread, confession by confession,
until what was hidden learns how to speak for itself.

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