Unspoken Loss

I remember the day well. It began with the smell of worms. I’m not actually sure if worms have a smell, but my 7-year-old mind was convinced they did. I suspect the fact that boys were gleefully harvesting their sickly pinkish-brown bodies and slinging them at us girls had something to do with that association.

That morning, the ground was wet, and puddles pocked my usual path to the bus stop. I noticed the slithering presence of the underground inhabitants, but I had no idea they would become a form of torment for me. As their wet bodies slapped against my hands, and became entangled in my hair, I felt disgust ball up in my stomach and rise into my throat.

With an anger I had no practice in suppressing, I heard my voice deliver a strident reprimand for the boy’s meanspirited behavior. Borrowing a tone often used by my mother, I attempted to shut down the assault perpetrated against both me and the worms. My protest was met with wide eyed amusement and one of the oldest girls among us said, “You better be nice, Melissa, or your mom will get rid of you like she did your brother.”  The words landed in front of me as if a spilled puzzle. Unable to perceive the complete picture as clearly as she had, I responded with youthful indignation, “I don’t have a brother.”

Delivered with the precision of a scalpel, she said, “You don’t anymore.”  

I remember feeling swallowed up by my own confused silence. As I contracted inward, everything around me became distant and inaccessible. I moved through the day as if the scared and befuddled parts of me had been squeezed out like toothpaste and now floated a short distance from my body. Adamant this would all be cleared up at the dinner table, I abided within the uncomfortable space that separated my mind and body.

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Accompanied by a yet unnoticed but compelling need for reassurance, I arrived at the dinner table expectant for our familiar routine. The seat that had always moored my sense of belonging in the world was shoehorned into a tiny space between the end of the table and the kitchen counter. Its lack of space had always been my cozy alcove within the family, but tonight it felt inadequate to hold both my presence and the extra baggage I arrived with.

Life at the table moved in its customary rhythm, marked by a crude percussion of scraping chairs, serving dishes, and voices vying for center stage. Still swaddled in the gauzy version of my senses that had been ushered in by the troubling words at the bus stop, I was content to let the more active start to mealtime settle into a quieter pace before presenting my pressing choice of topic.

Although chaotic, our disjointed round robin sharing finally delivered my much-needed moment of truth. “What about you, Melissa?” was the only invitation I needed. The words rushed out with an urgency that made them feel untraceable. They scattered across the table and as if innately knowing their weight. They flitted instantly into the dark unvisited corners of my parents’ consciousness.

My mother’s eyes shifted with a dark wave of undulating emotions that darted so erratically, I was unable to track or understand what had taken up residency there. The only thing my mind was screaming with unbearable certainty was that I had done something terribly wrong. My words, the simple utterance of sound, had unexpectedly landed in a way that made my mother recoil inwardly. With a momentum beyond her control, and immutable in its emotional wake, I instantly felt her rejection.

For a second time that day, an inner panic found me silent. Beseeching the comfort of my father, whose eyes never met mine with anything other than charmed amusement, I felt abandoned when his eyes could not meet mine. Instead, he looked across the table at my mother; seemingly grasping at the end of her frayed emotional rope and attempting to knot her unreliable tether back to his anchored presence.

As I slowly submerged in the depths of my parents’ fiercely guarded secret, my father’s wild eyes landed in the gulf of silence between us, pleading to understand why I had pulled the pin on that grenade! Bobbing in the tsunami of confusion my own words created, I heard sounds emitted from my father’s throat as he now sought to reestablish our connection. And it was in the space of a microsecond that I saw how small and scared he looked. I was devastated.

If words were said, they slid off the edge of betrayal that had surrounded me. Molded by a pain my parents had not yet learned they could hold; they had no other option but to encapsulate my inconvenient inquiry with silence and shame. I like to believe they were merely waiting to find the mysterious boundary between truth, healing, and age-appropriate explanations, but they had no idea their interminable waiting game with silence would be genesis for so much confusion.

In an irreparable moment of time, I stumbled into profoundly painful truths that forever altered my sense of interpersonal security and trust. But the most virulent lesson was that MY words could damage people. That day, my words became forever linked with fear and danger and my youthful mind made the only conclusion it could. Talking about my experience was not safe. For decades,this fear and misguided association has hijacked my ability to experience meaningful connection with others. Of all the losses suffered that day, the one I grieve most is my relationship with my own voice.

This is my story, but we all have them. We all have ways we have learned that expressing ourselves is risky business. In fact, we live with many cultural structures of suppression and unwittingly agree to stifle our voices in a myriad of ways. And unfortunately, I believe they are multiplying.

What do I mean by that? What are the socially sanctioned ways in which we withhold ourselves?

• We teach our children that certain questions are “inappropriate to ask.” 
• We teach young boys that they cannot feel sad, scared, or uninformed. Literally, making whole subsets of emotional vocabulary and experiences off limit to them.
• We teach young girls that they cannot be angry, assertive, or too independent. Conditioned into socially polite and pliable individuals, we bar ourselves from direct and honest expression and self-advocacy.
• We use social scripts to navigate a significant percentage of our social interactions, inherently understanding when someone asks the question, “how are you?” they don’t really want to hear about your unbearable grief or concern.
• We are instructed to avoid provocative subject matters like politics, race, religion, money, sex, health, death…and…all the social injustices wrapped up in each of those “Banned” topics.
• We have work environments that prescribe their own scripts, pace and professional boundaries designed to produce optimal business results, while safeguarding us from inherently messy and unpredictable human interactions.
• We have social mores that suggest elevated emotions like grief, anger and even exuberant joy are best shared in private settings.
• We’re inches from each other, but we’re advised against talking to strangers on elevators, or public transit.
• Despite its intention, political correctness has us scrutinizing and editing each other’s language; leaving many of us scared, tongue tied and defeated.
• Social media has ushered in epidemic levels of social shaming, and the new phenomenon of the cancel culture. Now we have a tool designed for social connection, which has been weaponized for social ostracization and leveraged into a disgusting vehicle for marketing and consumerism.  
• Our families, faith communities, ethnicities, and workplaces all have cultures that impart codes of loyalty and confidentiality.
• We learn there are people who have a tough time being around our happiness, our sadness, or our opposing viewpoint and these all become ways we choose to dampen or withhold them.
• People create their own individualized rules of engagement too. We all employ various tools of humor, defensiveness, and trite superficiality to keep our conversational partners well within the boundaries of our preferred brand of safe discourse.
• And we cannot forget all the oppressive internal committee voices…Is it necessary to say? Is it my responsibility to say? Will it make matters worse? How important is it? I don’t want to hurt them. I don’t want to make them angry. You can’t say that. That’s not yours to share. That’s going to make them uncomfortable. The list goes on and on…

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For decades, my fear, born out of an unfortunate and unspoken childhood experience, has isolated and imprisoned me with self-censoring and self-abandonment. And by consistently choosing this, I have also allowed my personal meaning making and storytelling to atrophy. Why bother keeping track of significant encounters with life when I know I will not choose to share about them? Why bother looking inward and knowing what is important to me if I allow my social interactions to be sculpted by others’ rules of engagement? This acquiescence is not unique to me…I think it sits at the center of our loneliness epidemic. We are as estranged from ourselves as we are from each other.

I have a confession to make…several years ago, I wrote my own eulogy. Not because I was concerned people would not have nice things to say about me. I knew people would easily remember how they felt in my company. I did it because I knew the truth… I had created a pattern that made it impossible for anyone to know anything about me.

Most people do not recognize my self-imposed verbal hobbling because I have skillfully hidden it behind genuine interest in my conversational partners. I know the best gift I can give someone is my full attention. I also know the best gift I have given myself is finding myself in another person’s experience. Both require listening. But my childhood fear and innate curiosity coalesced into a brilliant social hiding spot. I am learning that when I withhold my voice, I deny myself and my conversational partners the same gifts I just articulated. As it works out, true connection requires RECIPROCAL sharing AND receiving. I have been my worst enemy and I am both exhausted and frustrated. I believe we all are.

This blog has given me the opportunity to reclaim my voice. And yes, slowly, I am finding it within conversational exchanges, as well. My 2025 commitment to myself is to speak when I am scared to. To share when I would rather hide in my well-honed skill of listening. To start uncomfortable conversations and say what I mean. And to offer my voice, even if someone has not shown interest in it.

Now it’s your turn. What are the ways you hide yourself in your conversations and social interactions? My list above is by no means exhaustive. If you recognize other ways we are taught to abandon our own voices…please SHARE THEM.