No Longer Willing to Abandon Myself

Throughout my life, I have known the pain of being unheard and the ache of being called too much. Too sensitive. Too emotional. Too anxious. Too intense. Too loud. I was often diminished for my small stature, for being perceived as fragile, for living in a bodymind that does not move through the world in tidy or predictable ways. My struggles with mental health were used to discredit me, and words like “overreactive” or “unstable” quietly shaped how others responded to my truth.

There have been countless times when my words were brushed aside as symptoms and my clarity reframed as distortion. My intuition was pathologized. Over time, that kind of chronic invalidation seeps into the bones. It makes you question your own knowing. It makes you second-guess your memory. It makes you go quiet in rooms where you once felt certain. There were moments when I was gaslit into doubting myself, moments when I swallowed my truth to keep the peace, moments when I tried to make myself smaller and easier to hold.

Years of that erosion left me hollowed and uncertain of myself. I began to distrust my own body, my own grief, my own perception. I wondered if my voice would always be filtered through someone else’s comfort level, if I would spend my life trying to prove that I was credible and worthy of being heard.

And still, something in me refused to disappear.

There has always been a part of me that knows disabled and mad people carry sacred wisdom. A part that understands grief as holy. A part that recognizes sensitivity not as weakness but as attunement. That part would not go silent, even when I tried to silence it myself.

Slowly, I began rebuilding my relationship with my own voice. I started speaking even when my words trembled. I stopped translating my experiences into language that made other people less uncomfortable. I began honoring my madness instead of apologizing for it. I reclaimed my sensitivity as discernment, my intensity as devotion, my grief as holy.

The path back to myself has been messy af. It has required unlearning the reflex to shut down and shrink. It has asked me to sit with the fear of being misunderstood and speak anyway. It has taught me that my struggles do not diminish my credibility. They root me more firmly in truth. They make me more gentle with myself and more attuned to what matters.

I am working toward no longer allowing invalidation to define me. I am working toward releasing the need to be liked at the expense of my own integrity. I am learning to let go of other people’s opinions about me as a measure of my worth. I am unlearning the impulse to make others comfortable by making myself smaller or more palatable.

We deserve spaces where madness is listened to instead of dismissed, where grief is held instead of rushed, where disabled and chronically ill bodies are not minimized or questioned. We deserve to exist without having to prove our humanity. And I am no longer willing to abandon myself in order to belong.