The Pain I Tried Hardest to Hide Became the Thing I Now Feel Most Called to Share

For most of my life, I kept a mental list of things I hoped no one would ever find out.

I believed that the safest version of me was the version that kept certain rooms locked. Not hidden entirely, just closed. Off-limits. The kind of doors you walk past every day and stop noticing, until you realize you’ve built your whole house around avoiding them.

I figured if people only ever saw the parts of me that were working, they’d never have a reason to look away.

So that’s what I did. I hid what I needed to hide. I managed what I could manage. I got good at it…good enough that most people would have told you I seemed like someone who had it all. I let people meet the parts of me I was proud of, the parts that made sense, the parts that photographed well. And I quietly closed the door on the rest, telling myself I was protecting something. My son. My family. My reputation. The people who loved the version of me they already knew.

It’s exhausting, if I’m honest, keeping that many doors closed at once. You start to forget which version of yourself you’re supposed to be in any given room, and which parts you’re supposed to keep out of sight. After a while, managing the image takes more energy than actually living the life underneath it.

What I didn’t expect is that the very things I worked hardest to hide would eventually become the things I now feel most called to speak about.

I don’t think that’s a coincidence.

I’ve started to believe it’s closer to a pattern.

The Pattern I Keep Noticing

I’ve lived enough of my adult life in public to start noticing something.

The seasons that felt the most shameful while I was living through them have become the very seasons other people seem to need to hear about most. It’s an odd thing to sit with, that the very chapters I once prayed no one would discover are the ones people lean toward the hardest once I finally share them.

My struggles with mental health and postpartum depression following a traumatic birth experience. My sobriety journey. Infidelity. The unraveling of my marriage (see footnote). A season of psychosis that I'm still learning how to talk about, let alone fully explain. Decisions that changed the course of my life. Regrets I'm still making peace with. Mistakes I made that deeply hurt people I loved. Relationships that didn't survive who I was becoming. Chapters I'm still finding language for today.

The strange thing is that none of those chapters became lighter because I kept them hidden.

If anything, they became heavier. Every year I carried one of them in silence, it seemed to gain a little more weight, a little more power over how I saw myself. Silence has a way of convincing you that a story is worse than it actually is, simply because no one else has ever been allowed to hear it and tell you otherwise.

Shame thrives in silence.

I still believe some things deserve to stay protected, at least for a while. Timing matters. Other people’s privacy matters. There's a difference between guarding a story until it's ready to be told and burying a story because you're ashamed of it. For years, I couldn’t tell those two things apart. I told myself I was waiting for the right moment or permission from others to share certain parts of my story, when really I was just afraid of what would happen the moment I stopped waiting.

The harder I looked at that belief, the more I realized it was fear wearing the costume of patience. Yes, other people's privacy mattered. But somewhere along the way, I began using that truth to justify keeping parts of myself hidden. I told myself I was protecting other people, when really, I was protecting an image, and paying for it with a loneliness nobody on the outside could see.

And eventually, I reached a point where carrying these stories alone became more painful than telling the truth. The exhaustion of managing so many closed doors finally outweighed the fear of what might happen if I opened them.

That’s when I began to realize that the pain I had spent years trying to conceal might actually be the very thing I was meant to share.

I’ve also come to realize that truth often comes in layers. There are stories we can only tell after we’ve lived with them long enough to understand what they were trying to teach us.

Every one of those chapters felt like something I needed to survive and then bury, not something I'd one day speak about publicly, let alone build into work I feel proud of.

Author’s Note

This essay marks the beginning of paid subscriptions on this publication.

For the foreseeable future, the majority of my essays will continue to be completely free.

Over the coming months, I’ll be sharing some of the stories I’ve spent years trying to find the courage and language to tell. While many of those stories will eventually be explored publicly through my upcoming podcast, Psychic or Psychosis?, paid subscribers will receive early access to the deeper chapters of my story, along with occasional members-only essays and reflections before they’re shared more widely.

If you choose to become a paid subscriber, your support helps make it possible for me to continue this writing and finally bring the podcast to life this fall.

As a thank-you to everyone joining during this launch, all paid subscribers who subscribe within the next 7 days will receive 25% off their first year of membership. You'll also lock in today's standard membership pricing. Your 25% launch discount applies to your first year, and after that you'll continue at today's standard membership rate for as long as your subscription remains active, even if prices increase in the future.

Whether you read as a free subscriber or decide to support this work financially, I’m genuinely grateful you’re here.

Thank you for being part of this next season of my work.