Still Loud, Just Wiser, Pt. 2

The Day I Learned Silence Can Be Louder Than Screaming

I was in the back seat of a car that smelled like Marlboro Reds, sweat, and stale air.

My body felt heavy in a way it had never felt before, not just the weight of him, but the weight of something invisible and permanent. When it was over, there was no dramatic ending, no apology, no tears. Just the sound of the door unlocking.

He didn’t drive me somewhere safe.

He didn’t walk me inside.

He didn’t even look at me.

He pulled up to my house like he was dropping off takeout and told me to get out.

I stepped onto the pavement feeling like I’d left my real self behind in that car. I closed the front door quietly, afraid that if I made too much noise, someone might look too closely and see what had happened.

Growing up, we didn’t have a proper shower until I was in high school, so the bathtub was where I tried to rinse off the shame.  The water was hot enough to burn, but I kept scrubbing. Over and over. Until my skin was red. Until I thought maybe the heat could seep under my skin and boil away the dirt I felt crawling inside me.

It didn’t work.

I laid on my bed afterward, hair damp, body clean but still wrong. The room I shared with my 17-year-old sister was dim, safe in theory, but my chest felt like it was collapsing in on itself. I couldn’t explain what had happened, couldn’t even put words to it in my own head yet.

That’s when my mom walked in.

She didn’t ask if I was okay. She didn’t notice the way my hands shook or how I couldn’t meet her eyes. She just told me I had a “bad attitude” lately. That I was making things harder for her.  She had been fighting a cancer diagnosis for the better part of four years and it was all encompassing for our family.  Nothing happened that was not draped in the cloak of my mother’s heroic battle toward remission. So it was no surprise when she barked at me that I needed to stop moping and fix my face.

And there it was, the confirmation of a lesson I’d already learned: in this house, your pain is not yours. It’s an inconvenience to others.

That Night in the Car Wasn’t the First Time I Learned I Didn’t Matter

Earlier that year, during the summer before 8^th grade, I thought I had my first real boyfriend. Fourteen and stupidly certain that if someone wanted me, it must mean they cared about me. I didn’t know yet that sometimes wanting and caring are complete strangers.

He used me. I didn’t realize it until later, when his absence felt louder than any words he’d ever said. I told my big sister, looking for comfort, thinking maybe she’d understand. She didn’t keep it to herself. She told my mom and dad, out of her sincere concern for my salvation and potential banishment to the depths of hell for all eternity.

My mom didn’t come to me with compassion. She didn’t ask how I felt or if I was okay. Instead, she read my journal, my one safe place,  and found the words I’d poured out in private. Then she came for me like a storm that had been waiting years to hit land.

She stood there, hours on end, ripping into me.

Telling me I was disgusting for letting someone put their “dirty dick” in me.

Telling me I was sick. Stupid. A whore. That I was “getting used up by a bunch of foreigners.”

Her voice never cracked. Mine did.

When she was done verbally gutting me, she picked up my journal, the one place I had left to be real, and tore out each page, one by one. Fed them into the shredder while I watched. I sat on the steps, the metal edge biting into the back of my thighs like I was being branded. Page after page, the sound of the shredder was the sound of erasure.  Everyone at home stood clear, knowing that the only option was to hold on and pray that, eventually, my mom would get tired enough to send me to my room.

My dad didn’t stop her.

He didn’t tell her she was wrong.

He didn’t tell me I mattered in spite of whatever had happened.

And that was it, that pattern became the blueprint for my life:

Find the ones who are the most avoidant, the most incapable of loving me, the most hateful when I needed softness, and then spend years breaking myself into smaller and smaller pieces trying to convince them I was worth their love.

The Pattern Followed Me

You can walk out of your childhood home, but if no one ever taught you you were worthy of love, you carry the blueprint with you. Mine was simple:

Find the person least able to love me.

Ignore the warning signs.

Work tirelessly to prove I was worth keeping.

I became fluent in the language of chasing crumbs.

If someone pulled away, I ran after them.

If they criticized me, I worked harder to change.

If they ignored me, I convinced myself they were just “busy” or “complicated” or “hurt.”

It didn’t matter that I was starving. I told myself their scraps were a feast.

I called it love.

It was survival.

In my twenties, I might have met men who could have been safe. Men who would have shown up. If I had, I either ignored them or didn’t even notice. I didn’t know what to do with steady hands. I only knew how to hold on when someone was pulling away.

They didn’t need to hit me, though some eventually did. The emotional violence was enough. The withdrawal. The disdain. The way they could make my existence feel like an inconvenience in a single glance.

I stayed.

I stayed longer than I should have, every time.

Because somewhere in me, that fourteen-year-old girl was still on the steps, thighs pressed into the metal edge, hearing her mother’s voice telling her she was nothing. And she believed the only way to undo that sentence was to make someone like that love her.

The Quiet Rebellion Begins

I used to think rebellion meant fire and shouting. I thought it would look like a public declaration, a scorched-earth exit, a triumphant speech.

It didn’t.

It started with tiny choices.

Not answering the phone when I knew it would only be more cruelty.

Keeping my journal hidden and writing anyway.

Learning that I could survive the storm of someone’s anger without rushing in to fix it.

It started when I talked out loud in the shower, where I said things out loud that I’d only ever heard in my own head.

It deepened in faith, where I learned that my worth had been written by Someone bigger than my parents, bigger than any man, long before I took my first breath.

And slowly, painfully, I began to see the truth:

I am not broken for wanting love.

I am not disgusting for being human.

I am not “too much” or “too hard to handle.”

I am worthy. Full stop.

I still fall into old patterns sometimes because the blueprint doesn’t vanish overnight. But now I can see it for what it is: a map that was drawn for me by people who couldn’t love me the way I deserved to be loved. Not a map I’m required to follow.

My rebellion is quiet because it’s not for them.

It’s for me.

It’s in the boundaries I hold.

The love I give myself first.

The refusal to let my pain be erased or minimized ever again.

If you’ve lived your life begging for scraps from people who never planned to feed you, I want you to hear me:

You can rewrite the blueprint.

You can stop chasing the ones who run.

You can keep your progress instead of handing it back to prove your worth.

And maybe, one day, you’ll realize your own rebellion has already begun, not with a bang, but with the quiet, steady decision to stay with yourself, no matter who walks away.