I Keep Remembering the Times I Made It Easy for People to Underestimate My Hurt

Dear Delyara, I laughed while saying hard things. I downplayed what happened. I used gentle words for ugly experiences. I made myself easy to comfort because I didn’t want anyone to feel burdened by the full shape of what I was carrying. And now I look back and think: no wonder they didn’t understand. I helped them misunderstand me. I made the wound sound manageable. I turned pain into something socially digestible and then felt lonely when people swallowed it too fast. That regret is painful because it’s not clean. It’s not just what was done to me. It’s how often I collaborated with my own invisibility by being too articulate, too polite, too eager to keep the room comfortable while I was quietly bleeding in it.