The Child Who Held Her Voice

My Dear Stranger,

I was born different.

I felt it even before I understood it.

I was born into silence.

Not because I had nothing to say,

But because words could not reach me.

Or maybe there were too many words inside my head, and I didn’t know how to let them out.

They lived inside my head, crowded, restless, chaotic.

My mouth felt locked.

My thoughts were there, but they stayed trapped inside me.

As if there was a door between my thoughts and the world,

and I never learned how to open it.

For many years, I was lost in words.

No voice came out.

Everything stayed in my head,

thoughts, feelings, questions—all mixed like chaos.

My Dear Stranger,

So many years passed like that.

And I didn’t understand what was happening.

Full of noise inside, yet quiet on the outside.

It felt like my mouth could not keep up with my mind.

As my mind ran faster than my voice.

Faster than my tongue could form sentences.

My brain moved too fast.

My words were always too slow.

People saw a quiet child.

They did not see the storm behind my eyes.

They did not hear the conversations I had with myself,

the explanations I rehearsed but never released.

They thought I had nothing to say.

They didn’t see how full my head was.

They didn’t hear the voice inside me, ideas, questions, feelings,

They're spinning into chaos. I did not understand.

Sometimes I thought something was wrong with me.

Whether I was broken in a way no one could fix.

I wondered why speaking felt so hard.

I wondered if I would always be like this.

But even in silence, I was paying attention.

I was watching. I was feeling.

I was learning the world in my own way.

My Dear Stranger,

And maybe that is how I survived,

by holding everything inside until one day the words slowly learned their way,

I began to find my voice.

The words inside my head no longer run ahead of me.

They wait, and I can reach them. Understand them.

My thoughts and my mouth are learning to move together, sync at the same pace, in the same direction.

And for the first time, I can say what I feel, what's been inside my head,

not perfectly, but honestly.

And in that quiet progress,

I finally feel normal, not because I changed who I am,

But because my voice has finally found its way home.

Your stranger,

Vie