This as-told-to essay was submitted by Mara T. to The Growing Home and edited for clarity and length.
I grew up in a ranch house outside Columbus, Ohio, where pain had a ranking system. Broken bone, serious. High fever, serious. Everything else, keep moving. If I came in crying after falling off my bike, my dad would glance at my knees and say, “Walk it off.” If I got my feelings hurt at school, my mom would hand me a tissue and tell me to “toughen up.” Those words shaped me early. They sounded simple. They settled deep.
I remember one summer afternoon when I was about nine. I had twisted my ankle running across the cracked blacktop at the elementary school near our house. It swelled fast and I could feel my eyes burning. My older brother kept shooting hoops like nothing happened. I sat on the curb, pulled my sock higher and decided that if I stopped crying fast enough, I could still be the kind of kid adults liked.
That choice followed me for years. By middle school, I had become weirdly good at looking fine on the outside. I could smile through a headache. I could go to youth group, finish homework and help clear the dinner table while my stomach tied itself in knots. You may know that kind of performance. It wins praise early and it costs you later.
Years ago, when I was living in Chicago and taking the Blue Line home from Logan Square after work, I realized I had no idea what I felt half the time. I knew when I was overloaded. I knew when I wanted everyone to leave me alone. I knew when my jaw hurt from clenching. I did not know how to say, “I’m sad,” or “That crossed a line,” or even, “I need a minute.” I had been trained to skip straight past the feeling and get on with the day.
The thing is, that kind of training can look like maturity. People call you dependable. Calm. Low drama. I heard all of that. I also kept losing touch with basic signals from my own body and mind. Looking back, I can see that I had built a life around quiet self-abandonment. It felt normal because it was familiar.
1. The rules in my house
In my house, strength had a very narrow definition. You kept your voice steady. You finished what you started. You did not make a scene in the grocery store, in the church parking lot, or at your cousin’s birthday party at Chuck E. Cheese. Feelings were allowed in tiny doses. They had to be neat, quick and easy for everyone else to manage.
I remember when I came home from seventh grade after a girl in my class humiliated me during lunch. She had read one of my notes out loud. I cried in the kitchen while my mother cut green beans at the sink. She listened for about thirty seconds, then said, “You can’t let every little thing get to you.” I stopped talking because I understood the lesson. Pain was welcome only if it stayed small.
That message changes the way a child organizes herself. You start editing before you even speak. You study other people’s faces. You decide which part of your experience will irritate them least. Over time, your inner world gets translated into whatever seems most acceptable and that can leave you deeply confused about what you actually feel.
Researchers are finding that validation matters more than many of us were taught. In a 2024 study, psychologists Jeewon Jeon and Daeun Park found that “emotional validation, defined as the acceptance of emotions without judgment, is a beneficial technique for promoting persistence in the wake of frustration.” Children who received validating feedback stayed with a hard task longer than children who received invalidating feedback or no feedback. That finding hits me hard, because my family believed toughness created grit. Validation, it turns out, can support grit too.
There was a time when I thought being pushed made me strong. I can see a more honest picture now. I learned compliance, self-editing and early emotional restraint. Those skills helped me function. They also made it hard to trust my own reactions when something hurt.
2. I became the easy kid
By high school, I had turned “easy” into an identity. I was the daughter who never asked for much, the friend who said “whatever works,” the student who could carry too many AP classes and still smile in the hallway. Teachers loved me. My friend Danielle once said, half-joking, “You are impossible to read.” I laughed like that was a compliment.
I admit, there was power in being the easy kid. Adults gave me freedom because I caused so few problems. At home, that meant fewer lectures. At school, it meant being trusted. In relationships, it meant people assumed I was okay with almost anything, because I rarely said otherwise.
But ease can become a mask. When a person spends years making herself convenient, she often loses the habit of checking in with her own limits. You say yes before you even feel the no. You offer help while resentment is already building in your chest. Then you wonder why you feel lonely around people who say they love you.
Psychologist James J. Gross of Stanford has spent years studying emotion regulation and his work gave language to something I had lived for decades. In an APS piece on his research, Gross explains that suppression and reappraisal work very differently. The article says suppression creates “both cognitive and social costs,” and that people who suppress their emotions tend to have less well-being and fewer close relationships than people who use healthier strategies. When I first read that through Gross’s research, I felt exposed in the best way. It explained why my polished calm often left me tired and far away from everyone around me.
My friend David saw it before I did. We were sitting in a Starbucks in Seattle during a work trip and he asked a simple question after a rough meeting. “Are you angry?” I said, “No, I’m fine,” almost on reflex. He looked at me for a second and said, “You always skip over yourself.” That sentence stayed with me for months.
3. Silence started to feel safe
Silence can become comforting when speaking has felt risky for a long time. You stop expecting relief from honesty, so you begin finding relief in privacy. That was me in my twenties. I could sit in my apartment with Trader Joe’s soup warming on the stove, answer texts with cheerful emojis and keep whole storms to myself.
I remember one breakup in particular. We had been together long enough for me to imagine a future. When it ended, I took one sick day, washed my sheets and went back to work like a person starring in her own productivity montage. Sarah from accounting brought me a muffin from Corner Bakery and said I seemed “amazingly composed.” I thanked her. Then I went to the bathroom and stared at the stall door because I could not cry in a way that felt natural anymore.
When silence feels safe, you start protecting it. You avoid conversations that might uncover hurt. You choose people who do not ask many questions. You become highly skilled at giving updates instead of telling the truth. That difference matters. An update says what happened. The truth says how it landed inside you.
The social cost of suppression shows up here too. The 2017 meta-analysis by Elizabeth Chervonsky and Caroline Hunt found that greater emotion suppression was linked to poorer social well-being, including lower social support, poorer relationship quality and more negative first impressions. In plain language, when you hide too much for too long, connection gets thinner. People can only meet the version of you that you allow into the room.
It took me a long time to realize that my silence was not mysterious. It was protective. I had learned, very early, that words could make pain bigger if the room was impatient. So I made myself smaller instead. That strategy helped me survive. It also kept me from being deeply known.
4. Why everyone called me resilient
People love a person who keeps going. In American life, especially, resilience gets applause everywhere. You see it in offices, in churches, in family systems and in those breezy conversations over Sweetgreen lunch where everyone admits they are overwhelmed and then immediately says, “But it’s fine.” I was excellent at that script. I showed up. I delivered. I kept moving.
I remember when my grandmother died. I flew to Cleveland for the funeral, helped sort photos at my aunt’s house, held my mother while she cried and went back to Chicago two days later. My manager praised my professionalism. A cousin called me “the strong one.” I wore that label like a winter coat, heavy and familiar.
Resilience, as I lived it then, had a hard shell. It looked steady. It looked admirable. Inside, I was split off from my own grief. I could comfort everybody else at the visitation and still feel blank in the rental car on the way to Hopkins airport. That blankness scared me, because it looked so close to strength from the outside.
Years ago, I would have said self-compassion sounded soft, indulgent, maybe even lazy. Then I read Dr. Kristin D. Neff from the University of Texas at Austin. In her self-compassion review, she writes that “self-compassion is a productive way of approaching distressing thoughts and emotions that engenders mental and physical well-being.” That word, productive, mattered to me. It helped me see that kindness toward yourself can support growth, honesty and endurance.
My understanding of resilience changed after that. Real resilience lets you stay present with your experience. It lets you recover without pretending you were untouched. It creates room for tears in the Whole Foods parking lot, for anger on the walk home, for disappointment at the kitchen table. It gives your body and mind a chance to move through pain instead of storing it in the dark.
My friend Lena, who lives in Austin, told me something simple after I finally opened up to her about all this. “You always survive,” she said, “but you deserve to arrive too.” I knew exactly what she meant. Survival had been my specialty. Arrival felt brand new.
5. My body kept speaking anyway
You can silence words for a long time. Your body still keeps records. Mine did. It showed up as migraines, jaw pain, stomach issues and a kind of bone-deep tiredness that a good night’s sleep never fully touched. I kept trying to manage symptoms while ignoring the emotional climate that fed them.
I remember one Saturday in my early thirties when I was standing in line at Target in the suburbs outside Naperville. My cart held detergent, batteries and a birthday gift bag, very ordinary things. Suddenly my chest tightened and my eyes filled. Nothing dramatic had happened in that exact moment. I had simply been over-functioning for months and my body decided it was done cooperating with my performance.
That moment sent me back to an old question, one I had avoided because it felt too tender. What happens to pain when a child learns to override it again and again? Some of it turns into numbness. Some of it becomes hypervigilance. Some of it leaks out through sleep, digestion, headaches, irritability, or a constant sense that you are bracing for something.
A 2024 paper in the journal Pain helped me put this together. In the Pain paper, Dr. Sarah B. Wallwork, Dr. Melanie Noel and colleagues argue that validation of children’s pain may “reduce their vulnerability to the development of future chronic pain.” That idea landed with force. If a child’s pain is met with steadiness and care, the body may learn that discomfort can be noticed, named and handled. If pain is dismissed, the child may grow up fighting internal signals that were asking to be heard.
But boy, was I slow to connect the dots. I used to treat my body like a stubborn employee. If it sent up distress, I pushed harder. If it asked for rest, I gave it caffeine. If it reacted to stress, I called it inconvenient. That mindset kept me far away from body awareness and even farther from care.
6. I learned to hear myself
Change started quietly. It did not arrive in one tearful breakthrough or some cinematic therapy scene. It began when I started pausing before answering simple questions. “How are you?” became something I tried to answer honestly, at least with safe people. “Do you want to come?” became a real check-in instead of an automatic yes.
I remember when I first said, “That hurt my feelings,” out loud to someone I loved. We were sitting in a Mexican restaurant in Andersonville and my hands were actually shaking. The room did not collapse. He did not mock me. The conversation stayed awkward for a minute, then became clearer and kinder than anything silence would have created. That moment taught me that emotional honesty can feel fragile and still be strong.
You may need to learn this in tiny steps. I did. I started keeping notes in my phone with basic feeling words, because I had lost fluency. Angry. Ashamed. Disappointed. Lonely. Relieved. Hopeful. It sounds almost childish and that is part of the point. When a part of you stopped developing because it had to stay hidden, it deserves patient attention now.
I also began practicing self-compassion in plain language. Sometimes that meant putting a hand on my chest and saying, “Of course this hurts.” Sometimes it meant canceling plans without writing a five-paragraph apology. Sometimes it meant letting myself cry in the car outside Jewel-Osco and calling that a healthy release instead of a failure. Dr. Neff’s work helped me see that meeting pain with warmth supports well-being and Gross’s work helped me understand why constant suppression had left me so tired.
My life looks steadier now and also more alive. I still work hard. I still show up for people. I still value grit. I also pay attention when my body goes tight, when my voice thins out, or when I feel the old pull to smile past something that matters. Those cues are useful. They are part of healing from emotional invalidation.
There was a time when I thought losing track of myself happened all at once. I see it differently now. It happens in small moments when your pain gets waved away, when your sadness gets rushed, when your fear gets called dramatic and when your body learns that approval comes from being easy to manage. You can return to yourself in small moments too. You pause. You name the feeling. You trust the signal. You offer gentle resilience instead of force. For me, that is what growing up again has looked like and it has brought me back to a more whole, more grounded, more human version of my own life.