Letting Myself Break

Author’s Note: This isn’t a story I planned to tell. This week I planned to write a post on why I write, something structured and purposeful. But I couldn’t stop this from spilling out. So, while my family slept, it clawed its way out, and for the first time in a long time, I let myself break open and write the truth. This isn’t polished. It’s not structured or clean. But it’s real. It’s my truth and I think I began to heal something. This is what writing in the pain looks like.

I didn’t expect to fall apart tonight.
I thought I was just answering a journal prompt:
“What was the moment you realized your parents couldn’t give you what you needed?”

I started to type:
There wasn’t a defining moment. It was slow. Complicated. A blur.

But the second I wrote it, something in me screamed:

Liar.

The voice came fast, loud, and sharp.
And I knew.
I knew I was lying to myself.
I knew exactly when it happened.
I just didn’t want to go back there.

But the memory wouldn’t let me go.
It settled in my chest, heavy and waiting.

And the honest truth is, I don’t want to feel it again.
I already broke once. I don’t want to do it again.

But this is where writing through pain began for me.
This is going to fucking hurt.
And I’m going to do it anyway.

Writing Through the Pain

This is the memory I’ve been running from for years. The one I buried so deep I convinced myself it was gone.

But it’s never really gone. It lingers. It claws at the back of my mind, begging me to remember. Begging me to sit in it, to feel it, to finally give it a name.

I tried to pretend it didn’t exist. But it won’t leave me alone. It won’t stop pulling at me until I face it.

And maybe I’m tired of avoiding the moments that shaped me.
Maybe I’m tired of carrying pain I won’t name.
Because how can I pull the roots out if I can’t even name where they took hold?

So tonight—I’m not running.

The Root of The Pain I Run From

We had just come back from visiting my mom in Delaware. It was the month before I turned sixteen.

And for the first time in a long time, I felt something I didn’t recognize at first: Hope.

Maybe we could rebuild something.
Maybe she would finally see how hard things had gotten.
Maybe this time, she would choose me.

I told her everything. How bad things were at home. How exhausted I was. How much I needed a way out.

But sometimes, people need to see it for themselves.

My dad stumbled into the house, slurring his words, with glassy eyes, and blaming the blood running down his arm on a bag of oysters.

But even at fifteen, I knew better.

I recognized the look. I knew the lie because I had lived through it too many times.

I knew what it felt like to search his pockets for pills and flush them with my brother. I knew how to recognize the version of my dad who had disappeared into his pain again.

I felt like I had been dropped back into a life I’d been hardly surviving and trapped in a story I couldn’t rewrite.

And that night, my brother and I saw an opportunity to escape the pain of watching someone we loved unravel in front of us — and realizing we couldn’t save them.

So, we begged to go with my mom. And for once, I think she saw the heartbreak in our eyes.

It became real when my nana said what no one else would: “You’re sick, Kenny. You need help. This isn’t the place for them. Let them go.”

Letting Myself Feel

“This is going to hurt like hell, and I don’t want to do it.”
That’s what I typed right after I admitted I was lying to myself.
I didn’t want to write this.
I still don’t.
I want to shove it back into the dark where I’ve kept it for years.

Because I don’t want to hear him beg again.
I don’t want to hear him say, “I feel like I’m losing you.”

I don’t want to see the tears running down his face again.
I don’t want to watch him break again.

And more importantly, I don’t want to feel what I’m feeling right now again.

The guilt, the shame, the unbearable ache of leaving the one who always saw me.

So, here I am at midnight while my family sleeps.
And I am letting myself break in the dark, where no one can see.

Because this is the moment. The one I’ve avoided like hell. The one that is ripping my heart apart again.

This is the moment that split something wide open in me. The moment I said my silent goodbye. The moment The moment I left the only person who had ever made me feel truly seen — because I couldn’t stay and survive.
As I looked through the rearview mirror while my mom drove away,
that was the moment cracks in my heart turned into a wound.

Sitting in the Pain

People always say, “You have to sit in your pain to let it go.”

But no one tells you how to do it, and I think that’s where people get lost. It’s where I got lost.

But tonight I wrote my way through the pain.
I sat in it, and let it crush my chest and sting my eyes.

I let the raw, messy, and broken truth spill out.

And maybe that is what they mean when they tell you to “sit in your pain”.

By letting yourself finally name it and accept it.
And making sure it doesn’t own you anymore

Because sitting in the pain gives it shape.
And once it has shape, you can name it.
And things with names can be healed.

Writing this hurt.
Feeling it hurt.
But tonight, I let myself break.
Not for a blog. Not for a lesson.

But for me,

And somehow, after all of it, I feel lighter.

That part of my life has been released from the cage I placed it in.

There will aways be an ache. But it no longer owns me.