Nobody Can Know
What happens when “I have things to hide” becomes “I am someone who needs to be hidden”
This article is featured on Substack, Medium, and my Hellbloom Haven Blog
Every once in a while, I meet someone I admire. Someone who carries qualities I find beautiful, kindness, steadiness, warmth, curiosity, compassion. Someone I find myself wanting to know better, not necessarily romantically, but simply because something about who they are makes me want to move a little closer. Except I usually do the opposite.
I start thinking about my life. About the scars someone would eventually discover if they got close enough. The ocean of emotions I carry around inside me, how deeply I feel things, how sensitive I can be, my physical and mental health struggles, my complicated relationships, my past, my family, the choices I have made, and the things I am still trying to figure out. Suddenly, instead of wondering what it might be like to let someone know me, I start thinking about how I might complicate their life, so I create distance.
The strange thing is that I know better. I know everyone struggles. I know the happy, grounded, put-together people we meet have stories we cannot see. I know most of us wear masks in one way or another, presenting the pieces of ourselves that feel safe enough for the world while carrying entire histories underneath them. I know all of this, yet there is still a part of me that looks at someone I admire and thinks, You don’t need all of this. You couldn’t possibly want someone this broken. You deserve someone without so much baggage, someone whose life isn’t so complicated, someone you don’t have to work so hard to understand.
Before they ever have the opportunity to decide whether I am someone they could love, care about, or simply make room for in their life, I have already decided for them that I am too much to ask someone else to carry. Sitting with that tonight, I realized I have done this my whole life.
I have protected people from having to know me before they ever asked to be protected from me. I have assumed my emotions would be too heavy, my history too complicated, my struggles too exhausting, my needs too much. I have made myself smaller, kept pieces of myself quiet, created distance, or convinced myself that I was doing the loving thing by not asking someone else to hold space for everything that comes with knowing me.
I know some of that really was consideration for other people, but I can see now that some of it was also shame wearing the clothes of selflessness, because underneath, I don’t want to burden you was often something much more painful: I don’t believe you would choose me if you knew what choosing me actually meant.
Sitting with that tonight, I realized I have done this my whole life. I have protected people from having to know me before they ever asked to be protected from me. I have assumed my emotions would be too heavy, my history too complicated, my struggles too exhausting, my needs too much. I have made myself smaller, kept pieces of myself quiet, created distance, or convinced myself that I was doing the loving thing by not asking someone else to hold space for everything that comes with knowing me.
Which is heartbreaking when I admit what I actually want. More than almost anything, I want to be seen. I want to be known. I want to be understood and loved deeply, not because someone has been given a carefully edited version of me, but because they have seen the whole messy, complicated, emotional human being underneath it and decided they want to know her anyway.
While sitting here thinking about all of this, I realized there is a contradiction I haven’t wanted to look at too closely. I desperately want to be known, but I am terrified of being known. Being truly seen in all of my forms, understood, accepted, and still deeply wanted is probably one of the most attractive things I can imagine. There is something incredibly intimate to me about another person knowing the depths of you, the beautiful parts and the difficult ones, the softness and the scars, the light and the darkness, and not looking away. To be able to exist fully as myself in someone’s presence without constantly wondering which pieces I need to soften, explain, hide, or apologize for feels like the deepest kind of intimacy I can imagine.
Maybe that’s why the contradiction hurts so much. I want that kind of closeness more than almost anything, yet some part of me is constantly trying to protect myself from ever experiencing it. I have spent years healing, learning about trauma, survival, forgiveness, self-compassion, and why we become the people we become. I thought I had made peace with so much of my story. I thought I had buried the shame, or maybe even finally let it go. Tonight I realized some of it is still here.
It isn’t as loud as it used to be, nor does it always announce itself as shame anymore. Sometimes it disguises itself as consideration for other people. I don’t want to complicate their life. They deserve someone with less baggage. I don’t want to bring all of this into someone else’s world. Underneath those thoughts, though, is something much more painful: What happens when they get close enough to see me?
Not just the version of me that can talk about healing from the safety of hindsight. Not just the version who shows up, is helpful, works, takes care of people, laughs, writes, loves, and keeps going. I mean all of me. The scars, the mistakes, the things that happened to me, the things I did, the things I survived, the things I still struggle with, the little girl I used to be, and every version of myself I became trying to keep her alive.
Somewhere along the way, I learned there were things about my life that needed to stay hidden. Tonight I realized that at some point, “I have things I need to hide” became “I am someone who needs to be hidden”.
Nobody Can Know
I don’t remember exactly when I learned that there were things we didn’t talk about. I don’t think anyone ever sat me down and told me to hide my life. It was something I learned slowly by living it, by watching the people around me, by figuring out what could be said, what couldn’t, and what might happen if I said the wrong thing to the wrong person.
I also don’t want to paint my childhood as entirely awful, because it wasn’t. My parents provided for us. There was food on the table. We had always had a clean home. There were ordinary days, good memories, laughter, and love mixed in with everything else. Life is rarely as simple as good or bad, and neither were the people who raised me, nor was I.
But emotionally, things were much more complicated.
My parents were often emotionally absent, and I was exposed to things and brought into situations that I should have been protected from as a child. There was drinking, fighting, tension, mental health struggles, abuse, and experiences I didn’t know how to understand, much less explain to someone else. There were things I saw, things I experienced, and things I felt that I wasn’t always sure anyone would believe if I tried to tell them.
That fear of not being believed became its own kind of silence.
There was also this constant awareness of everyone around me. Nobody seemed to get along. Someone was always angry with someone else, hurt by someone else, talking about someone else, or refusing to speak to someone else. You had to know who you could talk to about whom because saying the wrong thing could create an entirely new problem. I learned to pay attention to people’s moods, expressions, tones of voice, and the energy in a room.
I was already an incredibly sensitive child with ADHD, deeply affected by other people’s emotions and the energy around me. I had also experienced a significant amount of trauma very early in life, long before I had the ability to understand what was happening to me or what to do with everything I was feeling. Add that to an environment where the emotional temperature could change quickly, and I think I spent much of my childhood taking in far more than I knew how to process. I didn’t understand just how exhausting that was at the time. I only knew that eventually I would reach a point where I simply couldn’t do any more.
The nurses at my school knew me well. There were plenty of days when I couldn’t make it through the entire school day without needing to lie down. Some days I slept for a while, while others I simply rested in a quiet, dark place where nobody needed anything from me. They often had a bed waiting because it happened frequently enough that needing a little space to decompress simply became part of my life.
Looking back, I have so much more compassion for that little girl. At the time, I didn’t have words like overstimulation, emotional regulation, sensory overload, or nervous system exhaustion. I didn’t understand ADHD or trauma or why everything seemed to affect me so deeply. I just knew the world could become incredibly loud, even when nobody was actually making any noise.
I noticed everything. A change in someone’s tone. The look on someone’s face. The tension between two people who weren’t speaking. The feeling that someone was angry even when they insisted they weren’t. I was constantly taking in information, trying to understand it, and adjusting myself around it. In a family where relationships were already complicated and the emotional temperature could change quickly, that sensitivity became another reason to pay very close attention.
I became very good at reading rooms, but I wasn’t always good at it. I learned through trial and error, and getting it wrong sometimes came with consequences. I would speak when I should have stayed quiet, trust the wrong person with something, misunderstand someone’s mood, or say something without realizing it would cause a problem. When I got it wrong, I could be punished, pushed away, yelled at, or have cruel things said to me. There were times I genuinely didn’t understand what I had done wrong, only that somehow I had gotten something wrong again.
So I learned.
I learned to pay closer attention. I learned when to speak and when to stay quiet, what information belonged where, who could be told what, and which version of myself felt safest in any particular moment. I learned to watch faces, listen for changes in tone, notice shifts in someone’s mood, and think about how something might be received before I said it. What probably looked like intuition from the outside was, at least partly, something I had practiced over and over because getting it wrong was painful especially from those I loved, because all I wanted was their love and time.
Silence and observation became very useful. They helped keep the peace, protected me from being questioned or rejected, and saved me from having to convince someone that what I had experienced was real. Eventually, keeping things to myself felt safer than risking being misunderstood, disbelieved, or discovering too late that I had trusted the wrong person.
I think somewhere in all of that, I stopped only asking myself, What do I want to say? and started asking, What is safe to say? Meanwhile, life continued normally enough from the outside. I could go to school after a difficult night and nobody would know. I could sit beside someone, laugh, finish my work, talk about ordinary things, and have an entirely different emotional world waiting for me at home. I learned very young that two realities could exist at once: the life people could see and the life I was actually experiencing.
As I got older, the circumstances changed, but somehow the secrecy followed me. There were unhealthy relationships I couldn’t talk about. Abuse I didn’t know how to explain. Things happening around me that I knew other people might not understand or believe. Choices I made that I wasn’t proud of. Ways I coped that I didn’t want anyone to know about. There were times I was simply trying to survive and times when, if I am being completely honest, I contributed to the chaos myself. Each chapter looked different, but the rule underneath it stayed remarkably consistent: Nobody can know.
Nobody can know what is happening. Nobody can know how bad things have gotten. Nobody can know what I did. Nobody can know what someone did to me. Nobody can know what I saw. Nobody can know what I felt. Nobody can know how much I am struggling. Nobody can know how scared I am. Nobody can know how much help I actually need.
Eventually, hiding became something I was very good at. I could function. I could work. I could take care of people. I could raise children, clean a house, make dinner, laugh, have conversations, show up for other people, and appear perfectly capable while carrying things inside me that felt impossible to explain. From the outside, people could know me without ever really knowing what my life felt like from the inside.
I think that’s where something began to shift without me realizing it. When you spend enough years believing certain parts of your life can’t be known, you become incredibly hyperaware of what other people are allowed to see. You begin to edit, explaining around things and revealing just enough to feel honest without becoming exposed. Answering questions without really answering them becomes second nature.
Eventually, you aren’t only protecting the secrets anymore. You’re protecting yourself from what you imagine might happen if someone discovers them. Maybe they won’t believe you. They might judge you, look at you differently, or even leave. They might think you should have made different choices or question why you stayed, why you participated, why you didn’t ask for help, or why you didn’t simply do something differently.
After enough years, you don’t even need someone else to question your reality or judge your choices. You learn to do it yourself. That’s the part I don’t think I really understood until now. I thought the shame belonged to individual pieces of my past, and if I healed those pieces, eventually the shame would disappear with them. I didn’t realize I had also internalized the experience of having a life that needed to remain hidden.
The secrets changed over the years but the hiding didn’t.
When the Secret Becomes You
There is a difference between believing there are things about your life people can’t know and believing there is something about you people cannot know. For a long time, the secrets were attached to my circumstances. Nobody can know what is happening at home. Nobody can know what happened to me. Nobody can know what I saw, what someone said, what I did, how scared I am, or how much I am struggling. There was always something specific I could point to and say, This is the thing I have to keep hidden.
But when hiding becomes a way of moving through the world, the lines start to blur and eventually, I wasn’t only protecting information. I was protecting myself from being fully discovered.
It’s such a peculiar thing to realize because today, I consider myself a pretty open person. I am confident in who I am in a lot of ways. I tend to be honest, sometimes probably more honest than I should be, and I don’t think of myself as someone afraid to talk about difficult things. I write about trauma, healing, grief, shame, survival, spirituality, mental health, and all of the messy pieces of being human. I can be incredibly vulnerable, and in many ways, I probably appear more open than most people.
That’s who I perceive myself as now, and it took a tremendous amount of inner work to get here. I have worked so hard to become someone who can stand in her own story without immediately wanting to hide from it.
That is part of what makes this realization so strange. I wasn’t walking around consciously thinking, I need to hide who I am. In many ways, I genuinely believed I had stopped hiding. I thought I had made peace with so much of my story, only to discover that being able to tell the truth about my life isn’t necessarily the same thing as believing I can be fully known within it.
I don’t think my vulnerability is false or carefully constructed. When I share something, I mean it. I have worked hard to become someone who can speak honestly about the things I have lived through, including the parts that aren’t pretty. What I am beginning to understand is that openness and being fully known aren’t necessarily the same thing. I can tell the truth about my experiences and still have places inside myself that I instinctively protect. I can speak openly about where I have been while still being afraid of what it would mean for someone to come close enough to see where I am. Maybe that is the distinction I have been missing. I haven’t been hiding my story nearly as much as I have been protecting the person inside of it.
Being known feels different.
Being known means someone stays long enough to notice the contradictions. They see the parts that don’t fit neatly into the version of myself I understand well enough to explain. They see me when I am compassionate and when I am angry, when I am strong and when I am overwhelmed, when I make good choices and when I don’t. They see the coping mechanisms I am still working on, the relationships I haven’t figured out, the wounds I thought I healed that still ache when something touches them, and the pieces of my life that don’t have a beautiful lesson attached to them yet.
I think this becomes especially complicated when you haven’t always felt loved or accepted simply for being who you are. When certain parts of you are criticized, punished, rejected, or treated as too much, you learn to adapt. You figure out which parts of yourself are welcome and which ones seem to cost you connection. You learn who appreciates your sensitivity and who becomes irritated by it, who can handle your emotions and who withdraws from them, who welcomes your honesty and who would rather you keep certain things to yourself.
Eventually, you become very good at wearing different masks. Not necessarily because you are being dishonest, but because somewhere along the way, adapting became part of belonging. Different people get different pieces. Certain emotions come out in certain places. Parts of yourself become quieter around people who have taught you they aren’t safe to express them with. You learn how to make yourself easier to understand, easier to accept, easier to love.
After doing that for long enough, being fully known can feel almost foreign. Being known means taking off the masks when experience has already taught you what doing so can cost. You know what it feels like to show a piece of yourself and have it criticized, rejected, misunderstood, or used against you.
You already know what it feels like when being yourself creates distance instead of connection. So even when part of you desperately wants to be seen, another part remembers all the times being seen didn’t feel safe. It means allowing someone to encounter the parts of you that aren’t perfectly regulated, healed, agreeable, convenient, or easy to explain and trusting that connection won’t immediately disappear because of them.
Maybe that is part of what I have been longing for all along: not someone who loves the version of me that learned how to be lovable, but someone who can know the person underneath all of those adaptations and still want to stay.
That is where I notice my shame gets louder.
Because there are things in my life that happened to me, but there are also things I did. Choices I regret. Ways I coped that hurt me or other people. Times I stayed when I should have left, participated in things I knew weren’t good for me, or became part of the chaos I was trying to survive. Healing has helped me understand the context surrounding many of those choices, but understanding myself doesn’t erase responsibility. It also doesn’t mean I have to spend the rest of my life punishing myself for having once been a person who didn’t know how to live differently.
I thought I understood that. Tonight, I’m realizing there is a difference between intellectually believing I deserve compassion and actually believing another person could know the whole story and still see me with compassion. That’s where the little girl who learned to hide is apparently still very much alive and hurting inside.
She doesn’t necessarily tell me, Nobody can know anymore. She has gotten much more sophisticated than that. Now it sounds like, I don’t want to burden anyone. My life is complicated. They deserve someone easier. I don’t want to bring my mess into somebody else’s life. Those thoughts sound thoughtful. They even sound loving, but I am beginning to wonder how often they are simply shame wearing the clothes of selflessness.
Underneath I don’t want to complicate your life is this belief I haven’t wanted to admit: If you really knew me, I don’t think you would choose me. Maybe that is what happens when you spend enough of your life hiding pieces of your reality. Somewhere along the way, “there are things about my life that need to stay hidden” quietly becomes “there are things about me that make me unworthy of being fully seen.”
Eventually, the secret isn’t something you’re carrying anymore. The secret becomes you.
Maybe I Don’t Have to Hide Anymore
I genuinely like the woman I am today.
The person I am today is someone I believe the younger version of me would look at in awe. I am proud that I have not allowed life to make me mean or bitter, that the things I have been through haven’t taken away my softness or my desire to see the good in people. I still love deeply. I still care deeply. Somehow, after everything, I still want people to feel safe, valued, and loved.
I trust myself now. I know I can figure things out, and when I don’t know something, I am not afraid to ask questions. I have proven to myself that I can do hard things. I have boundaries, I can walk away from relationships that are no longer healthy for me, and my cut-off game might be a little too strong sometimes. I am comfortable in my body, I feel mentally well, and I don’t need everyone to understand or agree with me. I am more free to simply be myself than I have ever been, far more than the child or teenager I once was.
I am even okay being the villain in someone else’s story if that’s who they need me to be. That is a freedom I never used to have. I spent so much of my life people-pleasing that the thought of conflict, someone being angry with me, or even being misunderstood could send me into absolute mental hell. I would replay conversations, question myself, worry about what someone thought of me, and feel an almost desperate need to explain, fix, or make things okay again.
I don’t carry that same responsibility anymore. I know my heart; I know the love I carry for people is genuine, and while my choices and reactions haven’t always been perfect, hurting people has never been something I take lightly. I can care that someone is hurt or upset with me without automatically believing it means I am wrong, bad, or responsible for changing how they see me. Someone else’s version of me no longer has to define my own.
In a strange way, discovering this layer of shame feels like an answer to something I have been praying for. I have been asking for clarity, for guidance, and for help seeing whatever might still be standing between me and the life I want to live. I have worked incredibly hard to become the beautiful woman I am today, and I’m proud of her. Not simply because I’m comfortable in my own skin, but because I’m proud of the person I have become on the inside. I am proud of my heart, my softness, my strength, the way I love, and the fact that everything I have lived through did not take those things away from me. I genuinely like who I am. I enjoy my own company, and I feel safe being myself when there is no one else there to judge, misunderstand, or reject me.
What I am realizing now is that feeling safe with myself and feeling safe enough to be fully known by someone else are two very different things. Apparently, there are still parts of me that aren’t entirely convinced I can have both authenticity and connection at the same time.
Sitting with this also makes me wonder if I have stumbled onto another piece of something I have been struggling with lately. I have wanted to become more visible on social media, especially with my writing and the business I am building, but every time I think about putting more of myself out there, something in me pulls back. I keep calling it privacy. I have wondered if I simply don’t like social media, or being recorded, if I don’t want strangers having access to my life, or if being visible just isn’t who I am. Some of that may still be true, but now I’m wondering if there is something else underneath that too.
Building something meaningful requires a certain amount of being seen. Not sharing every detail of my life or turning myself into content, but allowing people to know the person behind the words, my face, my voice, my personality, my story, and some of my imperfections. Maybe my resistance to social media isn’t entirely about social media. Maybe part of me still associates visibility with exposure, and exposure with being misunderstood, judged, rejected, or discovering that someone liked what I had to offer better before they knew the person behind it.
I’m not naive about what becoming more visible online means. Putting yourself in front of more people absolutely opens you up to scrutiny, criticism, misunderstanding, and opinions from people who know very little about you. I can sit here comfortably and say that doesn’t bother me, and for the most part, I believe that. But the truth is, we don’t always know how something will affect us until we are standing face-to-face with it. It is one thing to believe I can handle being judged by strangers. It’s a whole other thing entirely to give them the opportunity on a silver platter and discover how it actually feels.
Maybe that uncertainty is part of the resistance too. Not necessarily a sign that I shouldn’t become more visible, but an acknowledgment that visibility requires a kind of vulnerability I haven’t really practiced yet, and that’s really scary and uncomfortable to me.
I don’t know yet if that’s the answer, but it feels important enough to notice tonight. Maybe the little girl whispering nobody can know hasn’t only been showing up when I imagine letting someone love me.
I tell people all the time that healing never really ends. Apparently, I needed my own reminder. You do the work, peel back the layers, make peace with things you thought might destroy you, and eventually start thinking, Okay, surely we’re done now. Then life turns around and points to another layer and says, Not so fast….
I don’t see that as failure anymore. Finding another wound doesn’t erase everything that we have already healed. If anything, maybe we notice these deeper layers because we finally have the safety, awareness, and compassion to see them for what they are. There was a time when I could only survive these parts of myself. Now I get to understand them, hold them with compassion, and choose what I want to do with them, and honestly, how beautiful is that?
So I guess this is another layer for me.
I don’t need to dig up every secret, tell everyone everything, or prove that I have nothing left to hide. Privacy is not shame, and not everyone is entitled to every piece of my story. Maybe the work now is simply learning the difference between this is mine to keep and this must stay hidden because knowing it might change how someone feels about me.
It just hit midnight so I should probably end here and stop thinking and reflecting altogether and try to get some sleep, 6:30 am comes too quick.
If something in these words found a familiar place in you, I hope you’ll be gentle with whatever comes up. Healing has a funny way of showing us the next layer when we’re finally ready to see it.
For more reflections on healing, trauma, self-discovery, and finding our way back to ourselves, visit Hellbloom Haven at www.hellbloomhaven.com.
Good Night Beautiful Souls
Wendi
