the fear of vulnerability kills expression
i sit on the train sometimes and watch people on their phones, scrolling, texting, staring at nothing in particular, and i cannot help but wonder what they are all hiding inside.
i sit on the train sometimes and watch people on their phones, scrolling, texting, staring at nothing in particular, and i cannot help but wonder what they are all hiding inside. what they are running from. what conversation they are still replaying in their head. what message they typed out and never sent. something i can never wrap my head around is that everyone around me looks so composed, so ordinary, headphones in, face unreadable, and i know that almost everyone on that train is carrying something they have never said out loud to another person. why fear expression? what are we so afraid of?
you become afraid of what someone will do with your honesty. you can be sitting right beside them, close enough to hold their hand, and still be carrying something you desperately need to say. the words are already there on your tongue. you know exactly what you feel, you can taste it. but you look at them and remember what happened the last time you tried being that honest, and the words disappear somewhere between your mouth and your chest.
it happens with everything, not just the big things. you want to tell them you missed them, so you don’t. something they said has been sitting with you all day, and when they ask what’s wrong, you smile and say nothing. you keep telling yourself it isn’t worth bringing up, that it’ll pass, that you’re overthinking it, when really you just don’t trust what their face is going to do once you say it out loud.
fear changes the way you speak to people once it settles into you like that. you make yourself easier to be around because you are afraid of what happens if someone truly understands you. you type out a message at two in the morning because you cannot hold the feeling by yourself anymore, then you read it back after the sun comes up and start deleting sentences. you apologize before you’ve even finished explaining. you laugh in the middle of something that actually hurts. you soften every sentence until the thing you were trying to say barely resembles what you meant.
the person beside you may never know how much editing is happening in your head. they see you sitting there. they hear your voice. they think you’re fine because you have gotten so good at making fine look believable. they know your favorite things, the stories you tell when you’re happy, the way you laugh when something catches you off guard. they know the version of you that never asks for anything difficult. underneath all of that sit entire conversations they have never heard, entire versions of you they have never met.
the worst part is that you can still love someone through all of this. you can still want to be near them, still feel your whole body settle when they reach for you. love doesn’t disappear just because you’re afraid of being known. sometimes it makes the fear worse, because now there’s more at stake. the thought of them looking at something tender in you and deciding it’s too much is enough to make you hide an entire side of yourself and never mention it. so you keep choosing the version of you that’s easier to hold, even when it costs you something every single time.
that’s a hard way to love someone. studying them before you even open your mouth. carrying something heavy in your chest and thinking more about how they’ll take it than about what it’s doing to you while you hold it there. because you’re already hurting — that’s the part people forget. the pain starts long before the words ever leave your mouth. it’s in the message you deleted. it’s in wiping your face before you walk back into the room. it’s in sitting beside someone you love and feeling completely alone with something they should know.
you don’t really know someone until you see what they do with your vulnerability. people reveal themselves not in the ease of shared laughter, but in the moment you place something fragile in their hands. when you speak the truths you usually keep buried, when you let yourself be seen without armor, you are offering them a kind of access that cannot be undone. and in that moment, they choose who they are.
some will meet your openness with care, holding it like it’s something sacred. others will reduce it, overlook it, or turn it into something it was never meant to be. that is the measure of a person — not how they enjoy you, but how they handle you when you’re no longer easy to love. the right ones will never make your honesty feel like a risk you shouldn’t have taken. they will make it feel like something that was always safe to give, something you never have to take back or apologize for handing over.
you can’t spend your whole life waiting for someone to become the person you finally feel safe enough to be honest with. at some point you have to look at what the fear has already cost you — the words you swallowed, the conversations you never had, the nights you spent hurting alone because speaking up felt more frightening than suffering through it in silence. you should never have to make yourself smaller just to stay close to someone, and you should never have to earn the right to be honest with somebody who claims to love you.
when you finally see that, being vulnerable stops feeling like handing someone a weapon. it becomes two people sitting across from each other, everything exposed, saying the hard things because holding them in started hurting more than saying them out loud. giving someone that kind of trust means telling them this is the part of you you’ve spent your whole life protecting, and you’re letting them see it because you love them enough to stop hiding it, and because some part of you still believes they’re worth the risk.