The Quiet Mourning of a Self That No One Knew

What If I Stopped Hiding?

Photo by Daniela Paola Alchapar on Unsplash

There are versions of me that never got to exist. I think about them sometimes, like ghosts I never got to meet. One was louder, less afraid to take up space. She spoke without rehearsing, laughed without analyzing, let people in without bracing for impact. Another was softer, more willing to be held. She let herself cry in front of others, let herself need. They lived in me once, but over time, I buried them.

I didn’t mean to. It happened in small, forgettable moments—the times I felt dismissed, misunderstood, or too much. The times I saw someone’s face shift when I opened my mouth, their eyes flicker with confusion or discomfort. The moments when being fully seen didn’t feel safe, so I adjusted. Shrunk. Adapted.

I remember being 12, standing in the doorway to my mother’s room, eager to share a compliment my teacher had given me on my schoolwork. For a brief moment, I felt proud—until my mother’s response cut through it: "Being a student is all you are, so being a good one is your obligation." After that, pride in my work felt undeserved, as if it was something I had no right to claim.

When I shrink myself, I spend countless hours replaying that conversation in my head, rewriting it with something smarter, funnier, more insightful—just something more than what I said. My real thoughts, the way I truly want to express myself, always seem to dissolve under the weight of disapproval from someone important to me. I get mad at myself. Why did I let this version of me be seen? Why do I even care if they don’t agree or appreciate what I have to say? And, more importantly, how much longer will I keep hiding myself?

Until one day, I realized: there are entire pieces of me that no one has ever known. And that ache—that deep, quiet mourning—is something I carry alone.

I wonder how many of us are grieving lives we never lived. Not in the big, obvious ways—dreams we gave up on, paths we didn’t take—but in the small, intimate ways. The conversations we held back. The ideas we swallowed. The "I love yous" we never said out loud. And I wonder if we even realize we’re mourning.

Because it doesn’t look like grief, not at first. It looks like loneliness we can’t explain. Like a strange hollowness in a room full of people. Like a voice inside whispering, there’s more to me than this, but no one would understand.

So we hold these invisible funerals, over and over—quiet, unspoken rituals where no one else mourns because no one else knew who was lost. We bury our words before they are spoken, our dreams before they take shape, our true selves before they ever see the light. And with each burial, a part of us fades, unacknowledged, unnamed.

But what if those versions of us aren’t really gone? What if they’ve just been waiting—buried, but not dead? I spent years mourning the version of me that never got to exist, believing she had been lost forever—never realizing she had been here all along, waiting for me to notice her. So, after so much time apart, I decided to meet her. I took her out on dates, listened to her, cared for her. I told her the truths she needed to hear, the words she had always longed for. And somewhere along the way, we became one.

Lately, I’ve been asking myself: What would happen if I let those lost parts of me resurface? If I let myself be loud, messy, unfiltered. If I let people see me before I’m polished. If I gave myself permission to exist fully, without waiting for someone to prove they’ll understand.

Maybe it wouldn’t be as terrifying as I think. Maybe the right people—the ones who see me without needing me to shrink, who listen without expecting me to censor myself—would stay. Maybe I’d stay. And maybe, just maybe, I wouldn’t feel like I was mourning myself anymore.

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