There’s a pressure in my chest I can’t always name. It comes quietly, without cause, and settles in deep. It’s not sharp like panic or loud like heartbreak. It’s steady. Ancient. Like something that has been waiting a long time to be heard.

I sit with it sometimes, trying to breathe through the weight. It doesn’t scream. It doesn’t explain itself. It just stays. A presence more than a feeling. A knowing more than a thought. I think it’s grief, but not the kind tied to a moment. This grief lives in the in-between – between what I needed and what I learned to live without, between what I wanted to say and what I swallowed instead.

It feels like truth too. The kind that stayed quiet for years just to keep me safe. The kind that never got a voice, only symptoms. Sleeplessness. Shallow breathing. That ache in the ribs when you’ve been holding your breath too long. I’ve walked through life carrying this weight like it was normal. Like it was just part of being strong.

But it’s not strength. It’s endurance. It’s the cost of survival when softness wasn’t an option. When staying quiet was the only way to stay connected. When being too much meant being left.

Now I’m learning to stay with the ache. To listen when it rises. To ask what it needs instead of trying to push it down. Maybe healing doesn’t mean it goes away. Maybe it means I stop running from it. Maybe it means I finally stop pretending I don’t feel it.