Continued from Part 3.
I think that’s why this return feels so familiar.
It feels like coming home. Not to a place, but to a version of myself that I recognize in my body before I recognize her in my mind. The way I move. The way I speak. The way ideas spill out of me faster than I can organize them. The way emotion comes first, unfiltered, expressive, alive.
And I think that’s also why it feels like such a shock to everyone else.
Because I hid her.
I didn’t just tuck her away. I buried her. Carefully. Intentionally. Layer by layer, I covered her with practicality, capability, restraint, intellect, composure. I learned how to be impressive instead of expressive. Palatable instead of porous. Safe instead of alive.
And the cost of that hiding is only now becoming clear to me.
I hid my dancing. Not just the movement, but the way my body knew how to speak without permission.
I hid my performance. The joy of being seen, the thrill of expression, the electricity of attention earned through creation.
I hid my artistry. The hours and hours of practice, the talent that was not accidental but earned through devotion and love.
I hid my writing.
I hid my reading.
I hid my hunger for beauty, story, music, art, meaning.
I hid the girl who could lose herself in an album, read liner notes like scripture, replay the same song until it rewired her nervous system.
I hid the girl who lived at the library, who knew the librarian by name, who stacked classics like sacred objects beside her bed.
I hid the girl who believed art mattered, not as a hobby, but as a way of understanding the world.
And because I hid her for so long, I lost her fluency.
What once flowed effortlessly became stiff.
What once felt instinctive began to feel indulgent.
What once felt like home started to feel foreign.
That might be the hardest grief of all.
Not that I stopped doing these things, but that they stopped feeling easy.
This kind of loss is not dramatic. It’s quiet. It happens slowly. And by the time you notice it, years–sometimes decades–have passed. And then one day, you wake up and realize that most people only know your cover.
They’ve seen the spine.
They’ve skimmed the back.
Maybe they caught a random illustration somewhere in the middle.
But I never let anyone read the book.
I never let anyone see the context. The depth. The range. The beauty that existed, and still exists, inside me.
So of course this feels shocking to them now. Of course it feels sudden. What they are witnessing is not a transformation. It’s a reveal.
And what I’m witnessing is something else entirely.
I’m meeting parts of myself that feel both intimately mine and strangely unfamiliar. Parts that carry muscle memory but not momentum. Parts that remember who they are even when I don’t yet trust them fully.
That sadness I feel–the mourning–is real.
I’m grieving the years I spent in hiding.
I’m grieving the celebrations I never allowed myself.
I’m grieving the ease that comes from practice uninterrupted by fear.
But beneath that grief, there is something else.
Relief.
Because the parts I buried did not die. They waited. And now, as I unearth them, I’m beginning to understand that this return is not about becoming someone new. It’s about giving myself permission to be who I always was– openly, visibly, without apology.
