"No One Came to Tell Our Story So I Did"

The first time I understood silence, I was sitting on the floor, trying not to move.

I remember pressing my hands against my knees, like staying still could somehow protect me. Like if I didn’t move, nothing would go wrong.

I didn’t understand what was happening to my body.

No one had really explained it. Not properly. Not in a way that made me feel normal.

All I knew was that I had to figure it out quietly.

I had pieces of cloth in my hands and a fear I couldn’t explain. I kept checking again and again, adjusting, sitting carefully, thinking what if something goes wrong? What if someone notices?

Not because anyone said anything directly.

But because you just know.

You learn very early that some things are not meant to be talked about.

So you don’t talk.

That day, I didn’t just learn about my body.

I learned how silence works.

It doesn’t come all at once. It builds slowly.

In the way people avoid certain topics.

In the way pain gets dismissed as “normal.”

In the way questions don’t get real answers.

And after some time, you stop asking.

I started noticing it everywhere.

Girls missing school for a few days every month, then coming back like nothing happened.

Women brushing off pain like it’s just part of life.

Conversations that almost become honest but then stop.

And everyone acts like this is just how things are supposed to be.

But it’s not just this.

Outside, things have been changing too.

The weather doesn’t feel the same anymore. Sometimes it doesn’t rain when it should, and sometimes it all comes at once.

People don’t always say “climate crisis” where I live.

We just feel it.

In rising costs.

In stress at home.

In the way things are slowly becoming harder without anyone really explaining why.

And the strange thing is no one really comes to ask about these things.

No one asks what it feels like to live through it.

For a long time, I stayed quiet too.

It felt easier that way.

Safer.

Like maybe my story wasn’t important enough, or clear enough, or worth saying out loud.

But then I started realizing something. The problem is not that we don’t have stories.

The problem is that we’ve been taught to keep them inside.

So this is me, trying to unlearn that.

Trying to say things I was never taught how to say.

Trying to be honest, even if it’s uncomfortable.

I don’t have perfect words.

I don’t have a dramatic ending.

I’m still figuring things out.

But I know this much now

Silence doesn’t mean there is nothing to say.

It just means no one made space for it.

No one came to tell our story.

So I’m starting.