There comes a quiet day
when you realize
you’ve been narrating your life
to people who never intended to understand it.
You explained your “no,”
paused mid-sentence to soften it with a laugh,
traced invisible patterns on the table,
reworded every refusal
until it slid past expectations,
polite enough to disappear.
You over-clarified your boundaries
like a lawyer pacing your own kitchen,
pleading for permission
to exist exactly as you are.
Then something shifts.
You stop rehearsing sentences.
You let the text go unread.
You no longer preempt every criticism.
Your shoulders unclench.
Your chest rises and falls without tension.
You realize you were exhausted,
not by the “no,”
but by fearing the disappointment
of people you once loved.
Your chest tightened,
your palms sweat,
every time you imagined their judgment.
Here’s something most never admit:
Sometimes healing doesn’t make you kinder to others,
it makes you unrecognizable to them.
The people who relied on your explanations may pull away,
and that’s not rejection,
it’s your boundaries
doing their quiet work.
Not everyone deserves the map
to your inner world.
Some only use it to redraw your lines,
like a friend rifling through your journal
while you watch.
Healing is not louder communication.
Sometimes it is leaving your phone on silent,
locking the door,
sitting on your balcony at night with tea,
letting the city hum
while you say nothing at all.
In that quiet,
your nervous system exhales.
Your spine softens.
You hear your heartbeat
without the echo of another’s expectation.
You don’t owe clarity
to those committed to misunderstanding you.
You owe honesty to yourself.
You owe the freedom
to exist whole and unfiltered,
without apology.
And in that freedom,
you discover something sacred:
a life lived unedited,
a truth held without defense,
the gentle presence of simply being.


I love the idea “not everyone deserves a map to your inner world” - it’s so true and easy to forget 👌