Learning to Stay When You Want to Flee
You’ve carried things that were never yours to hold. This series is a gentle return to what you didn’t lose, but left behind.
There are moments when
everything in the body tightens before a single word is spoken, when the air in
a room feels heavy before anything has gone wrong, when silence feels safer
than honesty because somewhere in the past it became easier to swallow
discomfort than to let it rise, easier to step back than to speak into a space
that might not hold what needed to be said.
It does not always happen with
intention, and it rarely comes with warning, but there is a familiar way of
slipping out of the moment without leaving the room, of nodding along while
something inside goes quiet, of offering safety to others at the cost of
stepping away from yourself, and it happens not because of weakness or habit,
but because that response was once necessary, because survival sometimes meant
staying small, because it felt smarter to adapt than to risk misunderstanding
or rejection.
And after enough time spent
reading the energy around you, after enough moments of choosing ease over
friction, it can feel almost automatic to fold in the sharp edges, to translate
strong feelings into softer language, to downplay what matters most so others
can stay comfortable, but the cost builds slowly until one day it becomes hard
to recognize what the truth even sounded like before it was rewritten.
But there comes a time when the
pressure to hold everything in becomes heavier than the risk of letting it be
seen, when something inside no longer wants to keep shrinking just to make
space for what others expect, when staying no longer means disappearing, but
begins to mean staying with the discomfort, staying with the voice that wants
to rise, staying with the heat of anger or the weight of sadness or the
sharpness of fear without needing to cover it in calm or make it palatable.
Staying does not have to look
graceful, and it does not have to sound wise, it only asks for a decision not
to leave yourself again, not to smooth over what feels rough, not to step out
of your own body when it starts to tremble, and instead to remain right there,
inside the moment, inside the feeling, without reaching for an exit.
There is strength in the kind of
presence that holds steady when everything says run, when the voice shakes and
the hands fidget and the thoughts rush, and still the body stays, not frozen,
not shut down, but rooted enough to feel without needing to explain.
This is how trust begins to
rebuild from the inside out, not all at once and not for anyone’s approval, but
slowly, each time you stay with yourself a little longer than before, each time
you choose not to disappear in order to keep things smooth, each time you say
something real without softening the edge just to protect someone else’s
comfort.
And eventually, staying becomes less of a challenge and more of a practice. A way to meet what’s happening without shrinking or leaving. A way to remain loyal to what matters, even when the voice shakes or the hands fumble. And without needing to prove anything, something inside knows: there is no need to leave in order to be safe, and there is no need to disappear in order to belong.
You
don’t owe anyone your peace to prove your worth. Coming back to yourself is the
way forward.
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