Hello my amazing community.
Trust we're all doing good? It's an amazing topic for the week and I'd like to share something interesting with us.
For years, I lived on the lie that being quiet meant I was at peace.
I believed that if I stayed calm, avoided confrontation, and kept my thoughts to myself, life would just remain balanced.
My Silence felt like maturity and endurance felt like wisdom. I thought that choosing not to speak was proof that I had grown or something.
So I became good at being quiet.
I stayed quiet when things really hurt me and even when I felt misunderstood. Quiet when my boundaries were crossed by people around me. I told myself it wasn’t worth explaining, that people should already know better, reacting would only complicate things or make me look like an underage.
There were times people really hurt me, but I chose to be quiet and let it go without speaking to them about it.
But silence didn’t heal anything, it only hid it.
Every unspoken thought became a burden I carried alone. I always swallowed my emotions and they found a place to settle in my heart. I lost my peace while avoiding trouble and misunderstanding.
This made me write one of post with the caption “your peace is precious too”
The more I stayed quiet, the more invisible I felt. People assumed I was okay with whatever they did because I never spoke up. They mistook my silence for agreement, my patience for acceptance, and my endurance for peace. For reals, I always felt bad about all these.
The truth about the whole thing is that peace is not the absence of noise or being quiet, but it's the presence of truth. Being quiet can sometimes be wisdom, but when it costs your voice, it becomes self-neglect.
Unlearning this particular lie has been so uncomfortable. It means speaking even when my voice shakes and when I don't want to. I just decided to choose honesty over harmony and self-respect over approval and that's because my feelings and peace don’t need anybody's permission to exist.
I’m still learning when to be silent and when to speak. But now I know that silence should only be a choice to me and not a cage.
And I refuse to lose myself again in the name of being quiet.
SHALOM
I invite @soma18, @fashtioluwa and @afrikens to make their entry.