Felt and Unsaid
He grew up unsure whether it was safe to speak. Whenever he tried to share what he felt, even to confess when he had done wrong the words came back as blame, as if every emotion carried fault. Over time, he learned that silence was safer than expression. “I didn’t want to disappoint anyone,” he recalls. “I considered myself a failure for most of my life.” Wanting to speak but not knowing how, he turned to writing instead, a way to name what his voice couldn’t. The struggle to express himself shaped not only his friendships and relationships, but his trust. “It was hard to trust anyone, especially an older person,” he admits. “I wish I had spoken up more… told them what I felt, what I liked, or what I hated.”
Intimacy, for him, has always been both a desire and a fear. He longed for closeness but wasn’t sure he could sustain it without being hurt or misunderstood. “I would tell myself, ‘Why are you like this? Go break the cycle.’” He tried, but solitude often felt safer than rejection. Looking back, he wonders if his distance from others reflected his distance from God. “Perhaps my lack of intimacy with God contributed to the inability to be close to others,” he writes, seeing spiritual disconnection as the quiet root beneath relational distance.
Culture reinforced the silence. “Men must be strong,” he was told, but strength, he learned, often meant suppression. “I wasn’t afraid to express myself,” he says, “but I feared feeling weak or useless.” Alone, unseen, he found release only in private moments. “When no one is watching, I cry and scream.” Over time, he began to unlearn that shame. Seeking help once felt like failure, but he discovered that asking for help is, in truth, an act of courage.
The weight of his early relationships lingered. “I’ve been hesitant to enter a relationship because of the strained relationships I had with my parents,” he admits. Those early patterns of love, conditional, uncertain, made him doubt his own capacity to nurture something healthy. For years, he tried to fill emotional gaps with gestures: gifts, acts, distractions. “I thought I could compensate for the lack of connection by buying things,” he reflects, “but I knew what I really needed to do.” Healing required facing the fear itself ; the fear of being known.
Today, emotional honesty means something deeper. “It’s being free and truthful about what I feel,” he says. But honesty still feels risky. Criticism, even kind, can stir old wounds. “If someone says something hard, it takes me back,” he admits. “Maybe I thought I was fine until someone finally told me the truth, and I didn’t want to accept it.” Yet he’s learning that truth, even when painful, is the foundation of growth. Prayer helps him stay open, to speak with honesty and to listen with grace.
When emotions rise, he waits for stillness. “If everything is still intense,” he says, “the message gets lost. Once calm returns, we can find the middle, understand, accept, and respect one another.”
Psalm 32 : 3–5 (AMP)
“When I kept silent, my bones wasted away through my groaning all day long… Then I acknowledged my sin to You, and You forgave the guilt of my sin.”
His story is a quiet testimony to how silence can shape the soul, and how, even in the weight of wanting, God invites men not merely to be strong, but to be seen.
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