From Glass to Grace

I sat on the couch in her office, hands in my lap, trying not to pick at the fray in my sleeve, a small distraction to keep from unraveling completely. She rearranged her office since the last time I was there. Nothing drastic, but enough to throw me off. The cheerful family photo that used to sit behind her desk had been moved to a shelf across the room and somehow, that small shift was all I could focus on. It felt like they’d been repositioned just to watch me fall apart from a better angle. Like their smiling faces were now spectators to my unraveling, quietly judging from their new perch. The silence between us was thick, electric, like the moment right before glass gives way under pressure. When she spoke, her voice was gentle, but the words landed like a thunderclap… shattering something I hadn’t realized I was still trying to hold together. A thousand invisible wounds suddenly given names.

C-PTSD. Depression. Generalized Anxiety Disorder. A mouthful of clinical clarity.

Three clinical terms. Delivered softly, almost delicately. But to me, they echoed like a diagnosis and a reckoning all at once. One sentence that cracked open years of silent suffering. One breath that named what I’d spent a lifetime burying. A thousand invisible wounds, suddenly given form. Given language. Given weight.
There was something about hearing the words spoken out loud that made them hit differently, made them real in a way I wasn’t ready for. Like she reached into the chaos I’ve been carrying for years and began sorting it, gently pouring each piece into labeled jars and lining them up in front of me. As if to say, Look. You’re not making this up. You’re not weak or dramatic. You’re surviving something that’s trying constantly to swallow you whole.

I nodded. I even thanked her. But I didn’t cry until I got home, until the weight of it caught up to me on the bathroom floor, the one place that’s held me through every breakdown I never let the world see since I was a child. It felt like impact. Like a mirror splitting down the center, finally reflecting the truth I’d tried to edit, silence, and deny. I didn’t know if I was supposed to feel relief or shame. But I knew, in that moment, something sacred had been unearthed. And there would be no going back.

She told me to start journaling. Said it could help me track my triggers, notice patterns, maybe even create a sense of safety in the act of naming what hurts. What she doesn’t know is I’ve been writing my whole life, not just to understand myself, but to survive myself. Writing has always been my refuge, my reckoning, my silent scream. It’s the place I go when the world feels too sharp, too loud, too indifferent to hold me. 

For years, I write like it’s the only thread tethering me to this life. I write letters I never send and confessions I can’t say out loud. I document memories I want to erase, hoping that if I get them out of my body, I can finally breathe again. I write to ghosts. To grief. To the younger versions of me who still flinch at shadows and doesn’t understand why love left. I write to the girl I used to be, the one I still can’t find in the mirror. This isn’t new. This has always been my ritual. My rebellion. My way of bleeding in ink instead of silence.
But I’m not ready for her to know that. Not yet. My writing is the one place I don’t let anyone in. My journal is sacred ground, the only space where I don’t perform, don’t shrink, don’t edit myself to be more liked. She sees it as a tool. I see it as a lifeline. And some truths feel too tender, too raw, to offer up under fluorescent lights and clinical warmth. So I just nodded, as if this was something new and I was grateful for the tip. As if I hadn’t been spilling my soul into pages for years, hoping someone, anyone, would one day understand what I was trying to say without having to say it out loud.

But lately, even that safe place feels unstable, like the floorboards of my mind are starting to splinter. I told her I don’t trust my thoughts. And I wasn’t being dramatic. I meant it. Some days, they feel like liars, slick and convincing. Other days, they feel like loaded weapons aimed inward. The idea of giving them oxygen, of letting them exist outside my body, truly terrifies me. What if naming them gives them power? What if saying them out loud makes them realer? What if someone reads my words and confirms my worst fear… that I am too much, too broken, too far gone to be loved out of this? And yet... here I am. Writing anyway. Still bleeding into the page. Still whispering truths I’m not brave enough to say aloud. Because maybe this is what survival looks like, telling the story, even when your voice shakes. Maybe even especially then.

I think maybe this is my way of reaching out without having to say the words… of laying the pain bare in the daylight, even when the darkness feels safer. Of whispering to the universe, I’m still trying. Please, just let that be enough.

I miss my brother every single day. Not in the poetic, quiet kind of way people like to talk about grief. but in the gut-punch silence of mornings he’s not here. In the moments I want to text him and remember, all over again, that I can’t. There are parts of me that died with him… all of my soft, sacred parts I know I will never get back. And there are other parts still trapped in the scream, begging to be seen. The guilt. The grief. The endless loop of what if I had known? What if I had done more? The way his absence sits in every quiet corner of my life like a shadow that doesn’t leave.

And now, layered on top of that, come these new names for the ache I carry… C-PTSD, Depression, Anxiety. As if my mind, after all these years of holding it together, finally cracked open and said, No more pretending. No more silence. This hurts. And it does. God, it does.

But I’m still here. Still writing. Still reaching. Still trying to stitch together something that looks like healing, even if I don’t know what that means yet.

Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder… for all the years I spent pretending my life wasn’t traumatic. For the prison visits that became more familiar than playgrounds. For learning to read the faces of correctional officers like weather patterns, knowing which ones might sneer at me, or ignore me, or ask if I even knew who my father really was. I grew up inside visitation rooms, learning to love through glass, then across the tables, not even allowed to touch my dad. I trusted inmates more than I trusted the adults on the outside, the ones who looked at me like I was broken by association. They told me my dad was a monster. But my soul, my gut, felt something different. I knew love lived in him, even when no one else wanted to see it.

And at home, there was no soft place to land either. My mother was distant. Unreachable. I was the emotional adult before I ever got to be a child. I wiped tears that weren’t mine. Cooked dinners. Checked homework. Learned early that if I didn’t hold everything together, no one else would. I parented my sister while I was still trying to figure out how to be okay myself. I became the strong one. The reliable one. The one who didn’t cry, didn’t complain, didn’t make a scene, because survival depended on it. “Glass Child,” that’s what my therapist called me. At first, I didn’t understand. But then she explained, it’s the term used for children who grow up in homes where a sibling’s needs, chaos, or crises eclipse everything else. The ones who become invisible. See-through. Not because they’re fragile, but because no one ever stopped to look. The ones who learn early how to dim their light, shrink their needs, silence their pain, because someone else’s suffering takes up all the air in the room. That was me.

I was the quiet one. The good one. The one who didn’t ask for too much, because I learned that asking meant disappointment. My mother floated somewhere distant, tethered to her own pain, unreachable in ways I couldn’t name back then. So I became the one who picked up the slack. The makeshift grown-up. I brushed my sister’s hair, packed lunches, held space for tantrums that weren’t mine, and buried my own somewhere deep where no one could see them. I became responsible before I ever got to be carefree. I was praised for how mature I was, how “strong” I was. But no one ever asked what it cost me.

Being a Glass Child meant learning how to disappear in plain sight. It meant hearing things like, “You’re fine,” or “You’re so strong,” when I was anything but. It meant carrying grief, confusion, and fear in silence, because there was never room for my pain on top of everyone else’s. It meant being hyper-aware of everyone’s emotions but my own. Knowing how to soothe others while never being soothed myself. It meant performing strength when all I wanted was to be held.

That invisible girl still lives inside me. The one who wonders if her needs are too much. The one who flinches when someone asks how she’s doing. The one who doesn’t know how to ask for help without guilt.

I don’t think humans are meant to be see-through. 

I was invisible, so I starved. Not for food, but for safety. For nurturing. For someone to look at me and see the weight I was carrying and say, you shouldn’t have had to. But no one ever did. So I swallowed it. All of it. The loneliness. The confusion. The shame. I carried it like it was mine to carry. It’s a lifetime of holding my breath, hoping someone might see the child who never got to feel safe and still choosing, every day, to try again. My therapist says that healing my inner child starts with truly seeing her, the glass child. That now it’s my job to let her take up space, to let her speak out loud. I don’t know if I can do that.

Depression… for the days I vanish in plain sight. The days I disappear without ever leaving the room, when my body is there, but my soul feels like it’s sinking beneath glass, suffocating in silence. For the heaviness that settles in my bones like a winter that never ends, a cold I can’t shake no matter how many blankets I pull over my skin. For the way my limbs grow tired carrying invisible burdens, ghosts of memories, regrets, and sorrows that circle endlessly, whispering I’m never enough. For the mornings when the simplest act of standing feels like climbing a mountain with no summit in sight.

It’s the exhaustion that wraps around me like a second skin, thick and unrelenting, that no amount of rest can penetrate. For the way my body carries sorrow like muscle memory, tight in my chest, dull in my limbs, aching in places I can’t name. For the way my heart races one moment and feels frozen the next, like it’s trapped between panic and numbness. For the smile I wear like armor, bright, polished, believable, while underneath, everything quietly unravels. The slow, silent unraveling that no one sees because I’m so good at hiding the cracks. The way laughter sometimes feels like betrayal, like I’m faking a life I don’t really have.

It’s the loneliness that wraps itself tight even in crowded rooms, the disconnect between the world moving forward and me stuck, rooted in a place of shadow and stillness. It’s the way depression turns love into a distant memory, hope into a faint flicker, and tomorrow into a question I don’t have the courage to answer.

Generalized Anxiety Disorder… for the relentless cyclone of thoughts that never slows, spinning so fast they blur into a storm I can’t calm or control. For the tightness in my chest that wraps around my heart like barbed wire, squeezing breath and peace until all that’s left is panic hiding beneath the surface. For the way my mind races ahead, jumping from one terrifying “what if” to the next, looping in endless patterns of worry that don’t rest, don’t pause, don’t let me be.

It’s the gut-wrenching fear that the people I love will vanish in a blink, like smoke dissolving into thin air if I dare look away for even a second. The suffocating thought that any moment could be the last moment I have with them, and I’m powerless to stop it. It’s the hyper-awareness of every sound, every silence, every subtle shift in tone, scanning constantly for signs of loss or abandonment. This fear, irrational to anyone else, feels like survival to me… a necessary armor to brace against a world that has shown me how fragile love can be.

It’s the exhaustion of always being “on,” always waiting for disaster to strike, carrying a heaviness in my chest that no one sees but I feel in every fiber of my being, every nerve ending in my body. The whispered dread that I’m not safe. That somewhere, somehow, I’m going to continue to lose everyone else who dares to love me. And I’m already practicing how to hold the grief before it even arrives.

I didn’t ask for these labels, I don’t even want them. But maybe they’re not a prison. Maybe they’re a map. A way out. Or at least a way through. I’m learning not to be ashamed of the language used to describe my survival. I’m learning that healing doesn’t mean pretending I’m fine. It means showing up to the page, trembling hands and all, and saying, this is where I am. This is what it feels like.
And I’m still here. Even now. Even through all of it, I’m still breathing. Maybe that has to count for something.

Author’s note:
Originally written: January 4, 2019. Breaking silence, naming trauma, and learning to be seen in a world that never looked.

I remember the day my psychiatrist said the words out loud - C-PTSD, Depression, Generalized Anxiety Disorder. I remember how they hung in the air like smoke, how part of me wanted to deny them, while another part… maybe the deepest, most hidden part… finally exhaled. Finally felt seen. I didn’t know it then, but that moment would change everything.

Seven years ago, I was standing at the edge of myself, grief-soaked, untethered, raw from losing my brother, my mother, my grandpa, and my niece all in 18 months. I didn’t know how to move forward. I only knew how to keep breathing, one day at a time. I was afraid that naming my pain would somehow make it heavier. That these labels would define me or confine me. That people would look at me differently, like I was damaged, or fragile, or broken beyond repair.

But what I’ve learned in the years since is those words are not a life sentence. Maybe they’re not chains at all. They were a flashlight. A map back to myself. They helped me understand the patterns I was stuck in, the numbness I couldn’t shake, the fears that wrapped around my chest like vines. They gave shape to what had always felt shapeless. Maybe they were a way out… or at least a way through. They didn’t fix everything. But they gave me a place to begin.

Seven years later, I no longer carry shame around my diagnosis, I carry compassion. For the version of me who walked into that office, terrified and tired, still trying to make sense of the ache. For the girl who showed up to her healing even when it was messy, even when it was slow, even when she felt like she had nothing left. And for the glass child who lived invisible for so long and is finally learning how to be seen.

There are still hard days. There are still moments when the ghosts knock at my door. But I no longer believe they get to stay forever. I’ve built a life that includes softness, safety, and sacred truth-telling. I’ve found people who hold space without flinching. I’ve written my way through darkness and found light I never thought I’d see again.

The irony isn’t lost on me… how once, the very thought of anyone reading the darkest corners of my mind would send me spiraling into fear and shame. I guarded those inner demons like sacred secrets, convinced that if they ever saw the light of day, I’d be too broken, too “too much” to be loved or understood. And yet, here I am, having created a space, not just for survival, but for sitting with those demons openly, without shame or judgment. A space where the shadows don’t have to be hidden or silent anymore. It’s as if the things I once tried desperately to bury have become the very fuel for my healing, the raw material for connection and truth. What once felt like an unbearable vulnerability has become a kind of radical bravery. I’m no longer running from the parts of me that scare me most; I’m inviting them in, setting a place at the table, and finally giving them the voice they’ve long deserved.

That shift, that paradox… it’s messy, it’s tender, and it’s everything.