There are days like today when the weight builds up quietly, like silt at the bottom of a river, unseen, but always there. Heavy. I feel it rising in my throat, in the tightness of my chest, in how the world hums and blurs around me, like I’m submerged beneath it all.

The tears want out. They always do. But I don’t know how to let them. Or maybe I do, and I’m just too afraid. I can feel the ache pressing inside me, unmistakable, and yet, how does one cry at this threshold of the mind? When you’re standing at the edge of feeling and falling, afraid that if you cross over, you’ll lose a part of yourself you might never get back?

So maybe I avoid the mirror. Because if I see my own face, I might finally recognize what I’ve been burying all this time; grief I never gave language to, pain I’ve dressed up as strength. And maybe, just maybe, I look away because I know that if I meet my own eyes, I’ll see the parts of myself I’ve spent too long pretending don’t exist: the exhausted, the angry, the quietly broken. The girl who once believed she was unshakable. The woman who knows now that she isn’t.

Maybe instead I go to the shower, where the sound of water is louder than my breath hitching. There, I let the water do the crying for me. Because letting myself fall apart in the open feels too dangerous. The shower becomes a sanctuary. A place where the tears can fall unnoticed, where the breakdown is disguised as routine. No one has to know. Not even me, if I keep my eyes closed long enough.

Or maybe I find a dark room, close the door, and let the world shrink to four walls and silence. I curl into myself not out of weakness, but as an instinct to protect what little steadiness I have left. I wait in that stillness until the trembling fades, even if no tears come. Because sometimes, the pain doesn’t need to spill out to be real. Sometimes it just needs a place to sit in the dark, undisturbed.

Maybe I write. Like this.

I scribble it out of my soul because keys don’t tremble the way my voice would, and the screen never interrupts, never asks why. There’s something sacred in that silence, how this digital page holds everything without judgment, without flinching. I can bleed into every line, confess what I can’t say aloud, and the words simply receive it. No furrowed brows. No attempts to fix me. Just space.

In a world that moves too fast and demands explanations I can’t always give, writing is the only place where I’m allowed to break without consequence. Maybe that’s why I keep coming back to it. Because here, I can fall apart in a language only I fully understand.

Kas, one of my friends in Law school once told me that through my journal, I have a way of transferring my pain onto the page and that it made her cry. As if the sorrow passed from me, into these words, and then into her. Maybe that’s supposed to be the relief: that by writing, I lighten the weight. That the pain becomes easier to bear once it’s no longer just mine.

But that’s not what my intention is. I don’t write to let it go. I don’t write so someone else can carry it. I write because I need to feel it, fully and honestly without letting it destroy me. I write not to escape the weight, but to sit with it, to survive it. Because some pain isn’t asking to be fixed or forgotten. It’s asking to be acknowledged. To be seen.

And maybe that’s why I still can’t cry, even when I want to. Because I know it wouldn’t stop at just tears. I’m afraid of what else might break loose, what memories might claw their way back, what longings might rise louder than reason. What grief might finally drag me under.

Because once I start, and I mean really start, there’s no turning back. There’s no gentle sob, no single drop down the cheek. No cinematic weep with soft music in the background. It’s a flood. It’s collapse. It’s everything I’ve held together; my walls, my routines, my composure, crumbling into something I may not know how to rebuild.

And writing contains it. I know, crying might not.

So I stay dry-eyed.

But not untouched.

Love,

Ana 💋