I Learned the Truth

I didn’t learn the truth at seventeen. Janis Ian sang it like a weather report, but mine arrived a decade early. I learned it at seven, in the narrow hours after dinner, when the house held its breath: that I was visible only when someone needed a target or a mirror. I learned that a small person could be the wick for a larger flame. I learned that no one was coming. The one who would get me through would be me.

At seven, I counted stripes in the living room rug and invented secret countries inside the coat closet. I hid in the library and in the hush between words. I tucked small kindnesses into my pockets like smooth stones: a bus driver’s nod, a teacher’s patience. I trained my body to stand in a doorway and my mind to step three feet to the left. Attached enough to survive. Detached enough not to break.

At seventeen, the radio promised furious blue skies and exits that opened like mouths. I had a duffel bag by the door, the bus schedule memorized, forty-three dollars in a folded envelope. I could lift the handle and feel imaginary wind sweep my hair, the future pouring down the street to meet me. If this were the song, I’d have walked out and never looked back. But songs are short, and houses are not. Attachment is a ritual: after years of being pulled back, you start returning on your own.

I didn’t leave that night. I put the bag back in the closet and slept with my shoes on, as if my body might sneak away without me. Morning came with cereal that clinked like hail in the bowl, with the old choreography of voices down the hall. When someone asked me a question, I answered from two steps away. This is how you live like a ghost who pays the bills: you appear, you disappear, you learn to leave without moving.

I didn’t leave at nineteen, either, or twenty-one. I left in pieces. First my voice, which I smuggled out and tested on park benches and in job interviews. Then my money, gathered coin by coin, a secret rain barrel filling. Then my friends, who I let see me at noon, not just at midnight. Year by year, I shifted weight from the old threshold to the new. And still, when the door finally shut, the house followed. No one tells you that rooms can fold themselves into your chest like paper cranes.

By thirty I rented a place with a yellow couch and a crooked painting I hung on purpose. My street smelled like coffee and wet pavement; people fought over parking and lent sugar and said hello without looking for bruises on the air. The first night, the quiet was a different kind of loud. I woke in the dark reaching for old strings, found only the switch, and turned it on. In that thin light I startled at the shape in the mirror: not a target, not a mirror, just me.

Learning care was not a montage ... no dissolves, no heroic music. It was a sink of dishes done when no one would see. It was buying a plant, watering it wrong, learning the right way, and not apologizing to anyone for trying. It was burning my tongue on soup I made myself and laughing because feeling, even when it stung, belonged to me. It was choosing quiet over chaos. It was learning to disappoint people and survive it. It was letting someone be wrong about me and not sprint after their approval like a dropped scarf.

I had been a specialist in invisible usefulness ... the perfect student, the tireless coworker, the friend who anticipated needs like a weather vane. All of it a way to be necessary without being known. I practiced saying no. I let silence sit between us on the couch and refused to cushion it with jokes. Little knots loosened; little doors inside me stopped slamming. Some days I was brave; some days I folded laundry and called that victory.

Sometimes I hear that song on the radio, the one about the truth at seventeen, and I roll the windows down. I honor the fantasy ... the clean, fearless leaving, the bus at midnight, the city swallowing me whole. But my truth began at seven, in the hum of a refrigerator, the shadow behind a sofa where a child made a pact with herself. My leaving took the shape of staying with me when I wanted to vanish, of choosing myself when the old gravity tugged.

The last time I drove past the house, I didn’t go in. The curtains were still too heavy, the mailbox rust blooming like a bruise. The duffel from seventeen was in my trunk, empty and soft at the seams. The old animal of guilt lifted its head and settled back down. At a red light I checked my face in the rearview. It was mine. Not a surface to catch someone else’s storm. Not a bell for anyone to ring.

This is the truth I keep now, near the plant that’s learned the shape of the sun: I am visible to myself. It isn’t dramatic. It’s coffee measured, rent paid, my phone on do not disturb while I sew a loose button back on. It’s the ordinary music of a life I chose. Seven-year-old me sits at my kitchen table sometimes, fierce and serious, feet not reaching the floor. Seventeen-year-old me fingers the strap of the old duffel and nods. When a car door slams outside, we all look up ... then, slowly, we look back at me.

We’re here, I tell them. We left. And we keep leaving, every day we stay.

- Julia O’Hara 2025

THANK YOU for reading my work. I am a global nomad/permanent traveler, or Coddiwombler, if you will, and I move from place to place about every three months. I am currently in Peru and heading to Chile in a few days and from there, who knows? I enjoy writing articles, stories, songs and poems about life, spirituality and my travels. You can find my songs linked below. Feel free to like and subscribe on any of the platforms. And if you are inspired to, tips are always appreciated, but not necessary. I just like sharing.

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