There is this part of living that is super easy to do. The vast majority of my friends and family do it, and I think that it has somehow become second nature to us as humans once we reach a certain age… because it is certainly not an issue for babies. What is it that I’m talking about? Babies always tell us when something is wrong.

Somewhere in our early years of becoming people, we learn that sometimes it is easier to just not talk about it – the injury, the broken item, the missed opportunity, the bad grade, the lost friend, the broken heart, the painful memory, or sometimes the wonderful thing that matters to you that you’ve been told is silly or immature. We let, more often than not, these moments go unsaid for one reason or another. Now don’t get me wrong, some of them need to, because on the other hand, there are also people who blast memories and events into public mainstream with the sole purpose of destroying lives. That concept is NOT what I am condoning in this post.

How many of you, though, have been as I have… too afraid, hurt, maybe even crippled by your reality, that you have a hard time even letting your thoughts become words spoken only to you? I will go back in time to before what I’m sharing today at a later date to fill in the gaps, but what I want you to know, which I denied then, is that speaking up for you is critical to the path of your future. In the early fall of 2015, I began the portion of my journey that led to my today – in every way possible, good and bad. I was in denial about the fact that I wasn’t speaking up for my own growth in a healthy way. I’m not sure, honestly, that my today would be different because of some of the components of my journey, but I could have arrived here a lot healthier.

You see, through those early stages of my journey, I began to really see where I was allowing myself to be damaged and used, and it started to bother me, but I said nothing – which 100% of the time will perpetuate the issue and affect aspects of your life that you had no intentions of affecting… like your parenting, perhaps, from being distracted. Fourteen months after starting this part of my journey, I hit my first breaking point, which I’m grateful for. It was the first time I let my inner thoughts escape my brain even with only me as the audience, and I wrote the following:

Oct 2016 – No Escape

I thought I wanted to make it better, then I guess honesty came out and I realized that I just want to be free more than I’d ever tell anyone. I’m good at pretending, and I don’t know how not to pretend. I don’t want to be close. I want to cry and run away. But it works for you because I will save your image with all I have because that’s who I am. I guess that means that all I will do is nothing at all. Maybe someday, I’ll be free.

Here’s the problem… I read those words, which may seem cryptic, but I feel all of the desperation all over again. I am sure that some of you are trying to figure out what I was talking about, and if that is you, then you’re missing my point. Where is the journal entry about how something was wrong? I’ve always taken writing seriously because at some point, I learned that writing it down makes it real. I didn’t want it to be real, so I didn’t write it. And I have been so historically scared of hurting people and of their perceptions, also a major flaw, that if I don’t write it down, I WILL gloss over the issue when I attempt to speak about it. I know this about me (though I’ve just recently realized that I may be growing in that area – major Woohoo!). So I never spoke about it either.

My story doesn’t end here. But, I will tell you, this is still moderately near the beginning since it was 3 years ago. That said, if you are able to empathize with the desperation in my writing… please speak up. I can’t say if it will alter your story 5 chapters later, but I can say that it will help those chapters in between read a lot better than they might based on your trends today.

In ‘sort of the beginning’, speak up…