There’s a kind of fear that doesn’t arrive all at once. It doesn’t kick down the door. It seeps in, like humidity through cracked paint or smoke through the seams of a closed window. The kind that makes a home in your chest, building slowly and silently. That’s the kind of fear I’ve had about writing.
Because writing—real writing—isn’t just performance. It’s not what you show them. It’s what leaks out in the spaces you don’t control. In the metaphors you didn’t mean to use. The slip of a memory. The softness in a sentence when you swore you were being strong. That’s the terror. That somehow, on a blank page, people will see you—unasked, unfiltered, unprepared.
And I’ve been dodging that kind of exposure for a long time.
You grow up learning to hide parts of yourself. In some neighborhoods, vulnerability is just another way to get hit—emotionally, spiritually, or with something less metaphorical. So you learn. You get good at it. You make armor out of silence and humor out of pain. You laugh loud enough to drown out the parts of yourself you don’t want heard.
For me, it started early—ridiculed for being soft. For caring. For feeling things too deeply. Every time I let something slip, there was a consequence. Sometimes it was teasing. Sometimes it was loneliness. Over time, the message became clear: protect yourself.
So I did. I built walls with intention. Not just to keep people out, but to keep something in—me.
Lately, though, I’ve started letting people in. Not the whole crowd. Just a few. Just enough. You find someone you trust—maybe a friend who knows the shape of your silence—and you let them see a little more. A crack. A draft of warmth. Not a storm.
But still, I worry.
Because once the dam is broken, who controls the flood?
That’s the thing about pain: it’s obedient until it isn’t.
So I let it out in trickles. A sentence here. A sigh there. I’ve convinced myself that’s safer. That if the moment goes sideways, I can slam the valve shut and pretend like I never said anything at all.
I’m curious if that’s preservation or cowardice. Or both.
Sometimes, the isolation feels like a weighted blanket that won’t get off my chest. You carry the weight of your untold stories like overdue bills, knowing the interest is accumulating. You pretend you’re just private. But privacy, in excess, becomes starvation.
You tell yourself you’re protecting yourself—but at what cost?
When no one knows your whole name, who will mourn you properly?
That’s the mess of it. Writing—this act of storytelling—isn’t always about catharsis. Sometimes it’s confrontation. Sometimes it’s putting a mirror to your own face and realizing you’ve spent years looking away. The stories we don’t tell are often the ones we most need to understand.
I write now not because I want to be known, but because I’m starting to believe that parts of me are worth knowing.
And if someone out there reads this and recognizes their own mask, their own silence, their own slow-burning rage and resignation—maybe we’ve both done something that matters.
I don’t have answers. Just questions for the future.
What happens when you open too much?
What happens when you never open at all?
Maybe the trick isn’t to dam the flood or drown in it—maybe it’s to learn to wade.
Even if it means revealing that you bleed just like everyone else.
Kyle J. Hayes
kylehayesblog.com
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