Resist the urge to overexplain yourself when you’re hurt(ing)
I have spent too much time
turning pain into paragraphs.
As if the right arrangement of words
could make someone feel
what it was like to be me.
As if somewhere between
the third explanation
and the seventh example,
I would finally stumble upon
the sentence that made you say….
Oh.
Now I see you.
So I explained.
And explained.
And when you misunderstood me,
I explained the misunderstanding.
When you misunderstood that,
I explained my intention.
My tone.
The context.
What happened before.
What I meant
and what I didn’t mean
and why what I said
wasn’t quite what you heard.
Until eventually
I wasn’t explaining what hurt anymore.
I was defending who I was.
Trying to prove
that my pain wasn’t insecurity,
that my questions weren’t accusations,
that my boundaries weren’t control,
that my anger didn’t appear from nowhere.
Trying to prove
that the worst version of me
wasn’t the whole of me.
And maybe that’s where I lost myself.
Not in loving you.
Not even in forgiving you.
But in believing
I needed your understanding
before I was allowed
to understand myself.
Because two things can be true.
You can have felt trapped
by my questions,
and I can have felt abandoned
inside your answers.
You can remember my anger
more vividly
than everything that came before it,
and I can remember everything that came before it
so vividly
that eventually anger
was all I had left.
Neither memory
has to disappear
for the other to exist.
Maybe you were protecting yourself from my reactions.
Maybe I was reacting
because I no longer felt protected
by your words.
Maybe we were both standing
inside the same fire
pointing at each other
trying to explain
who struck the first match.
And maybe
it doesn’t matter anymore.
Because I know something now
that I didn’t know then:
Being understood
is beautiful.
But being understood
is not a prerequisite
for being true.
I do not need to present
Exhibit A
through Z
for my hurt to have happened.
I do not need to reopen every wound
to prove that it once bled.
I do not need you to agree
that the weight was heavy
before I am allowed
to put it down.
And I don’t need to make you wrong
to finally choose myself.
So when I am hurting,
I will resist the urge
to turn myself into an explanation.
I will resist the instinct
to chase someone through language
begging them to arrive
at the version of me
I know myself to be.
I will say what is true.
Once.
Maybe twice.
And if my truth still requires
a courtroom,
a timeline,
a thousand screenshots
and three years of context
just to be permitted to exist
I will stop arguing.
Not because I have nothing left to say.
God knows
I have always had words.
But because I am finally learning
that silence can also be
an act of self-trust.
There are things
I may never make you understand.
There are versions of me
that may only ever exist
inside your memory
as difficult,
too much,
too emotional,
too insecure.
And for the first time,
I think I can let her
live there.
Because I don’t live there.
I live here.
And here,
I know what I felt.
I know what I did.
I know what I regret.
I know what I would do differently.
I know what belonged to me.
And I am learning
to leave behind
what didn’t.
So resist the urge
to overexplain yourself
when you’re hurt(ing).
Some people will understand you.
Some won’t.
Some may understand you
only after losing access
to the version of you
who kept explaining.
But your healing cannot depend
on the moment someone finally says
Oh.
Now I see you.
Sometimes closure
is seeing yourself.
And deciding
that is enough.
