What I Couldn't Say Out Loud, I Said on Paper

The pages I hid revealed the woman I was trying to hide from everyone else.

My husband used to call around 7 p.m., right after he’d fueled up somewhere in Ohio or Arkansas or wherever the dispatcher had sent him that week, and I’d stand at the stove with the phone wedged between my ear and my shoulder and say the same four words every single time. “We’re good. I’m fine.”

I was not fine. I hadn’t said an unrehearsed sentence out loud to another adult in eleven days. But there was no version of that phone call where I could say the truth, which was: I am so lonely I’ve started talking to the dog like he understands English, and I resent you for choosing a truck over a family, and some nights I eat until I can’t feel my own thoughts because it’s the only volume knob I have left. You can’t say that to a man who’s eight hundred miles away with nowhere to put it and no way to fix it from the driver’s seat of an eighteen-wheeler. So I said we’re good, and I meant it the way you mean a lie that’s protecting someone else more than yourself.

That’s the sentence I wrote instead, later, after he’d hung up and I’d put my four kids to bed. I wrote it exactly like that — I resent you for choosing a truck over a family — and something in my chest loosened just from seeing it exist outside of me, even though I knew deep down he was providing for his family and that was my abandonment wound talking. But I still wrote it down. Not because writing it fixed anything. He never read it. Nothing changed the next morning. But there is a specific kind of relief in watching a true thing take shape on a page after you’ve spent all day pretending it isn’t true at all.

There were other sentences like that. I resent my own children for needing me every single hour of every single day, when that’s what children are supposed to do. I don’t know if I love my husband in his new role as an over-the-road truck driver or just know how to survive being married to him in this new trucking lifestyle. I think my mother would be disappointed in who I actually am underneath who I show her. None of those are sentences you say at Thanksgiving. None of those are sentences you say to a friend unless you’re prepared for her face to change, or worse, for her to try to fix you on the spot with a Bible verse or a suggestion to “just get out more.”

Paper never asked me to explain myself. It never said, “you don’t really mean that.” It let the sentence be exactly as ugly and exactly as true as it needed to be, without demanding I soften it into something more palatable for polite company.

I think a lot of women are walking around with a whole second vocabulary they’ve never used out loud. Sentences that live behind their teeth. Mine came out at night, at the kitchen table, in handwriting that got messier the more honest I was, like my hand couldn’t keep up with how long I’d been holding it back.

I used to think that meant something was wrong with me, that I had thoughts too dark to say to another person’s face. Now I think it just meant I hadn’t found the right person, or maybe there wasn’t one. Maybe some things aren’t meant for another person at all. Maybe some things are only meant to be gotten out, processed, and released from the heart however that happens, wherever it’s safe.

The page never needed me to be a good wife or a good mother or a grateful woman whose husband was out working hard to ensure we had food, clothes, lights, heat and air, and a car to transport us. It just needed me to be honest. That turned out to be the thing I’d been starving for the whole time. Honesty. Not an audience. Not advice. Not absolution. Just somewhere to put it down that wouldn’t put it back on me.

If there’s a sentence in you right now that you’ve never said to another person because you already know how their face would change, I understand why it’s still in there. I understand why it might need paper before it ever needs a person.

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ARE YOU LOOKING TO DIVE DEEPER INTO SELF-CARE?

I Can Help in Developing A Plan For Self Care

 Do you want help developing a self-care plan that works for your own busy schedule? Do you want accountability in implementing a self-care plan? If you or someone you love is struggling to maintain optimal mental and emotional health, consider reaching out to Spiced Life Conversation Art Wellness Studio and Botanica. We are a Metro Atlanta, Conyers Georgia area. We are a coaching and counseling practice with empathetic, skilled counselors and recovery coaches who can help you set goals, develop a self-care routine, and move forward to build a more fulfilling life. Our team would be happy to work with you either just for a couple of sessions to develop and implement a Self-care plan or longer term to work toward overall better mental health within our membership site or other programs.

About The Author:  Dr. Nikki LeToya White MSEd-TL, Ph.D. RHN is the founder, director, and full-time board-certified trauma-informed nutritionist, folk herbalist, and wellness consultant at Spiced Life Conversation Art Wellness Studio and Botanica. She created Spiced Life Conversation, LLC Art Wellness Studio, and Botanica to provide the Metro Atlanta area with counseling and coaching services where clients are carefully matched with the right program for healing abandonment and childhood emotional neglect trauma that cause codependency, emotional eating, financial stress, and imposter syndrome as it relates to the fear of success and being abandon. We help you begin your emotional healing journey with ease. Recently, we have expanded to include an online membership site so we now provide support to people living all over the world. All of our recovery coaches provide at least one evidence-based treatment to assist in your recovery. Dr. White is a big proponent of self-care and helping people live a fulfilling life! She has been in full remission with both codependency and emotional binge eating disorder since 2016. In living a life in recovery from sugar addiction. I love my low-sugar balanced lifestyle.

Best Regards

Dr. Nikki LeToya White