What Silence Is Mistaken For

My therapist has an Ernest Hemingway quote framed on her wall. It’s simple, almost deceptively so. A plain background, a small bouquet of flowers above delicate lettering that reads, “You are so brave and quiet I forget you are suffering.” I know the quote well. It’s from A Farewell to Arms. I read the book once in school and liked it enough, but that line stayed with me. I highlighted it in pink the first time I saw it. I remember, as a teenager, thinking it was a compliment to be seen that way. Seeing it again today, years later, felt different. Heavier. Almost accusatory. I couldn’t help but think how ironic it was to have that sentence hanging in a therapist’s office, where suffering is supposed to be loud, named, witnessed. I finally asked her about it.

She smiled gently. I’ve come to find that she does this when she’s about to say something that will sit with me longer than I want it to. She said the quote isn’t meant as praise. It isn’t a compliment. It’s a warning. She told me Hemingway wasn’t admiring the bravery; he was naming a failure of perception. That it’s about how easily we mistake composure for wellness, silence for strength. “People learn how to survive quietly,” she said. “And the world rewards them for it. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t in pain.” She paused, then added, “Sometimes the bravest thing isn’t enduring. It’s letting yourself be seen while you’re hurting.” I nodded, like I understood. I didn’t. Not really. I’m still thinking about it hours later.

I’ve been writing for as long as I can remember. At first, it was poems that I thought had to rhyme to count. They were clumsy and forced, and when the rhymes didn’t land, I assumed the problem was me, that I was doing it wrong. Then, when I was eleven, my mom gave me a book of Emily Dickinson’s poems. Everything shifted. Her writing didn’t ask permission. It bent rules. It breathed in metaphors and spoke in fragments and dashes, and somehow said more by saying less. I fell in love with her melancholy, with how she used imagery like a scalpel, precise and devastating. I became obsessed, not just with her work, but with her life. The reclusiveness. The restraint. The way only a handful of her poems were published while she was alive, and even those were altered, stripped of her syntax by others’ intent to make them more desirable. I learned she once called publication “the auction of the mind,” and I remember thinking, at eleven years old, how badly I wanted the opposite. I wanted to be seen. I wanted someone to decide my words mattered enough to share.

Now I sit surrounded by years of journals, and I understand her hesitation in a way that makes my stomach turn. The idea of someone reading mine makes me physically ill. Truly. I can’t imagine it. I can’t imagine dying and leaving behind these notebooks full of my ugliest thoughts, my most unfiltered fear, my unhealed anger only for them to be unearthed and passed around, analyzed and judged by people who never knew the cost of carrying them. The thought feels like exposure without consent, like being flayed open after the fact. There are things in these pages that I only survived because they were never spoken aloud.

And now, knowing that, I feel for Emily in a way I couldn’t have understood before. I ache for the woman who built a life small enough to protect her inner world, who tucked her mind away like something sacred, never meant for public handling, only to have it pried open after death. I imagine her words like pressed flowers hidden between pages, meant to be discovered gently, if at all, suddenly pinned beneath glass, labeled, interpreted, touched by hands that never learned the weight of holding them. I imagine the violation of it… the most private reckonings lifted from their quiet rooms and held up to a light she never agreed to stand in, her restraint mistaken for permission, her silence translated into consent. I once envied the immortality of her work, the way her words outlived her body. Now I grieve the cost of that survival. I grieve that her mind, which she guarded with such intention, was auctioned anyway, that her interior life became a spectacle she never chose. I think about how carefully she hid, how deliberately she withheld, and I feel a kind of sorrow that sits low in my chest because I know now that hiding isn’t vanity or fear, it’s protection. And I wonder how many of us write with that same quiet dread humming beneath our sentences, knowing that the pages that keep us breathing in the dark could one day be dragged into the open, misunderstood, misheld, turned into something we never meant them to be.

So when I noticed that Hemingway quote again today, staring back at me from the wall, it felt like salt in an already open wound. Like he knew. Like he was calling me out. For as long as I can remember, I’ve been the “strong” one. I once overheard my brother telling someone I was the backbone of our family. My mom has always described me as poised, as someone who always has it together, always shows up. My dad used to say I was tougher than nails. They meant it as love. As admiration. But when I read my journals, the ones that never lie, I see my truth. I’m not composed. I’m barely contained. My thoughts can be vicious and dark. My laughter is often armor. I’ve mastered the art of holding myself upright while everything inside me collapses.

My thoughts aren’t just sad, they’re feral. Grief doesn’t move through me like waves; it claws. I can make dinner, answer texts, show up where I’m expected, and then go home and write lines like, I don’t want to die, but I’m exhausted by the discipline of staying, or If I disappeared quietly, would anyone feel relief instead of loss? If I stop holding everything together, maybe someone will finally notice how broken it is. Some nights my mind rehearses erasure, not always death, but the fantasy of absence, of slipping out of the narrative without causing another emergency, without becoming another thing my kids have to survive losing. Other entries are crueler, aimed inward. I am only valuable as long as I keep functioning. No one needs the truth, they just need me upright. I monitor myself constantly, like there’s a guard posted inside my own head… checking tone, checking posture, checking for cracks that might alarm someone. Rage leaks into the margin at the universe, at God, at myself for surviving when my brother didn’t, at everyone who still needs me dependable while he has torn a hole straight through the center of my life. By day, I function flawlessly. By night, I write like someone pacing a locked room, testing the walls, memorizing the exits she’s sworn not to take, telling herself she’s fine while something dangerous presses against her ribs. These pages don’t read like someone who is coping. They read like someone performing stability while quietly negotiating with something that wants her to stop. They read like someone containing something violent enough to scare even herself.

When my brother first took his own life, everyone was shocked. The shock rippled outward because he was the fun one, the magnetic one, the life of every room. No one saw it coming. I think about that a lot. I wonder if when I’m gone, the same ripple will happen. If people will talk about how much I carried, how much I endured without breaking. If they’ll say they never knew I was struggling, that I seemed so strong, so steady, so brave and quiet. I wonder if they’ll find the journals. If they’ll read the darkness I kept folded neatly inside myself and feel blindsided by it. I wonder if they’ll finally see the cost of being the backbone. And I wonder, terrified and curious all at once, if it will change the way they remember me, once they realize how much of my strength was survival, and how much of my silence was suffering.

And maybe that’s why the quote won’t leave me alone. Not because it describes me, but because it exposes the danger of being described that way at all. Brave. Quiet. Strong. Words that sound like praise but function like blindfolds. Words that let suffering go unnoticed because it performs so well. I don’t know yet how to set my armor down without feeling like I’m betraying the version of me everyone depends on. I don’t know how to speak without first translating my pain into something prettier, something soft enough not to alarm anyone. But I do know that I’m tired of being admired for how much I can endure. I want to be known before it’s too late to correct the story. I want my pain to exist in the present tense, not be discovered later like a footnote, a postscript, a tragedy people swear they never saw coming. And maybe this, writing it here, letting it breathe without apology, is the first quiet act of refusing to disappear behind my own strength.

Author’s Note:
Originally written: June 10, 2019 - the stories we leave behind when no one hears us

I wrote this in the quiet place where most of my writing begins, the space meant only for me. The kind of writing that doesn’t ask if it’s ready, or appropriate, or safe to be seen. It just spills because it has to. Reading it back now, as someone who has started sharing pieces of her inner life with the world, I feel the familiar tug-of-war rise up again. The instinct to protect. The instinct to edit myself into something easier for everyone else around me. The instinct to dog-ear the page and say, hmm, maybe not yet.

I also remember that when I wrote this, I was actively weighing the cost of keeping these journals at all, like literally keeping the physical copies. The month before, another entry I chose to share here, I seriously considered burning every single one of them. I remember sitting on the floor of my closet, surrounded by years of my darkest thoughts bound in spiral notebooks, feeling the weight of them press in on my chest. The urge to rip them apart felt almost rebellious, like reclaiming my body from words that had begun to feel like they owned me. I was suffocating beneath metaphors and similes, letters and punctuation stacked like debris. Even the language that once saved me felt like it was closing in. I couldn’t breathe.

Some entries make it onto the blog almost immediately. Others that have sat for weeks, months, years, weighed down by excuses that sound responsible but feel suspiciously like fear, may never make it here. It’s not the right time. It’s too raw. It might be misunderstood. Some things are meant to stay private. And maybe that’s true. Maybe some pages are sacred because they were written only to keep me alive. I’m still learning the difference between honoring my boundaries and hiding behind them.

This piece lives right on that edge. I share it because I’m tired of pretending that silence is the same thing as strength. Because too many of us are praised for how well we suffer without making noise. Because I’ve seen what happens when pain goes unseen for too long. If this resonates, know that you’re not alone in the quiet, and you don’t have to earn your right to be witnessed. And if this piece someday disappears back into the privacy of my journals, let this note stand as proof that, at least once, I chose to be seen anyway.