DARK WHISPERS SERIES

I was eight the first time I realized silence could be louder than screaming.

It was a dinner table, three chairs, no eye contact...just the soft clink of cutlery and a hum of something broken hanging in the air like smoke. I wanted to ask if anyone else felt it. I didn’t. I just ate my rice and memorized the rhythm of holding my breath.

As I got older, I became fluent in silence.

I bit back thoughts like they had sharp edges.

Swallowed sadness like it was something polite people didn’t mention.

Laughed at things I didn’t find funny just to make sure no one noticed the war in my chest.

I never said I was hurting.

Never said I felt like a ghost sitting in my own skin.

Never said I hated the mirror some days.

Never said how tired I was of carrying everyone else’s weight while mine kept slipping through the cracks.

I smiled instead.

Wrote poems I never posted.

Deleted voice notes.

Typed texts and backspaced every word.

Of Course, no one knows about it because I never talked about it.

The things I never said out loud?

They built a home in my bones.

And some nights, they rattle so hard, I can’t sleep.

But even now, I don’t scream.

I whisper through pages.

Because paper doesn’t flinch when you bleed a little truth into it.

If this sits heavy in your chest too…

you’re not alone.

Some of us never learned how to say it out loud.

But we write.

And maybe that’s enough, for now.

I didn’t wake up one morning and love myself.

There was no sudden moment, no dramatic makeover, no slow-motion video of me standing in front of a mirror, smiling at my reflection like the commercials.

My glow-up didn’t look like confidence.

At least not at first.

It looked like me, sitting on the bathroom floor, crying into a towel so no one would hear.

It looked like deleting someone’s number without waiting for closure.

It looked like realizing that closure was never coming.

People talk about glow-ups like they’re transformations.

Like you go to sleep broken and wake up whole.

But mine was nothing like that.

It was slow. And messy. And boring.

Sometimes it looked like getting out of bed when all I wanted to do was disappear.

Sometimes it was brushing my hair after three days of not caring.

Sometimes it was eating a real meal instead of crackers and soda.

And sometimes it was saying, “I’m not okay,” out loud for the first time…

even if no one was listening.

I stopped looking for someone to save me.

Stopped waiting for the perfect moment to begin again.

Instead, I started noticing the little wins:

When I said “no” without explaining.

When I didn’t text back out of guilt.

When I walked away from a conversation that used to leave me anxious for hours.

No one saw those moments.

No one posted about them.

No one called it a glow-up.

But it was.

I stopped apologizing for needing space.

Started letting go of people who only showed up for the shiny parts of me.

Stopped checking if they viewed my story.

Started writing my own instead.

And slowly—painfully—I began choosing myself.

Not in a loud, flashy, “watch me thrive” kind of way.

But in the way you choose something sacred: carefully, consistently, and without needing anyone else to understand.

So yeah…

My glow-up didn’t go viral.

But it was real.

And maybe, just maybe, it was the kind that lasts.

Because it came from the inside.

And it came from me.