The First Time I Learned to Swallow a Cry
Some of us didn’t learn to speak. We learned to pause, to shrink, to hold it in. This was the first silence I mistook for safety.
I was small enough to believe
a sob could save me,
that if I cracked open my throat,
someone would come running
to hush the hurt.
They didn’t.
They turned up the TV.
They closed the door.
They called it discipline.
It wasn’t the loudness that scared them.
It was the need.
The inconvenience of emotion
showing up uninvited.
So I held my breath
until the lump in my throat
turned into silence.
And no one praised me for surviving.
They just liked me better
quiet.
Since then, crying feels like trespassing.
Since then, silence feels like home.
They thought my quiet meant I was strong,
well-adjusted, resilient,
the kind of person who could hold a storm
without ever showing rain.
But the truth is quieter than that.
The truth is: I was starving.
I mistook suffocation for self-control.
I called my own silence discipline
because no one taught me any other kind of survival.
I learned to swallow my need so deep
it turned into bone,
the kind that aches when weather changes,
the kind you can’t name without breaking something open.
What they loved was the version of me
that never asked for too much,
never made demands of their comfort,
never forced them to look at the mess beneath my polite nodding.
An easy person. A convenient person.
A grave dressed up in a living body.
But silence isn’t peace.
It’s an unspoken contract:
my pain stays hidden,
so you never have to feel yours.
This poem is a confession,
a crack in the wall I built with my own bitten tongue,
proof that behind every calm smile
there is still a throat
raw with words that deserved to be loud enough
to ruin the room.
Sometimes silence is survival.
But surviving isn't the same as being seen.
And healing is remembering
the sound of your own voice… unapologized for.
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.