They Forgot You Had a Pulse

“To be strong is one thing. To be seen as nothing but strong is exile.” — Unknown

I carried silence like a medal.
Everyone clapped for the way I endured.
No one noticed the marrow thinning,
the cracks spreading through my ribs.

I forgot the shape of reaching hands.
I trained my throat to close before words rose.
Even water felt heavy,
as if asking for a drink might drown me.

The room filled with voices,
and I stayed empty in the corner,
practiced in vanishing,
practiced in looking unbreakable.

Now my tongue feels foreign.
Even the thought of asking for help
scrapes like glass against my teeth.

“The strong one gets left behind emotionally because no one expects them to need anything. That loneliness compounds. Especially when you stop knowing how to ask.”

Strength has its own kind of exile. People mistake it for immunity. They see competence and assume capacity. The result is that you become a container for everyone else’s needs, while your own remain unnamed. The absence of being asked slowly rewires the way you show up. You stop offering signals. You stop expecting care. You even stop recognizing the moments when you might have needed it.

Loneliness doesn’t always begin in neglect. Sometimes it grows in the shadow of admiration. The strong are rewarded for their reliability, but every reward is also a reinforcement: don’t falter, don’t reveal, don’t ask. That cycle compounds until silence feels safer than speech.

The work is to remember that being seen is not a betrayal of strength. It is part of its depth. Asking isn’t weakness, it is the boundary that keeps strength from collapsing into self-erasure. You can hold others, yes. But you must learn to let someone hold you without apology.

I’ve poured everything into this. Healing Thoughts II: 33 Poems and Meditations for Emotional Renewal is up for preorder now. Release date: October 1. These pages carry the deepest, sharpest work I’ve done, and I can’t wait for them to be in your hands.

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It’s only getting rawer from here.