No Place to Hide

When avoiding the truth gives it power

Photo by Bonnie S. Heisse.

What is it about silence that frightens us?

There is something that has been wanting to surface for years. Something we learned to keep buried by adding more responsibility, more noise, more motion. If we stay busy enough, attentive enough, useful enough, we don’t have to face what waits underneath.

Silence doesn’t accuse. It doesn’t demand. It simply waits.

Avoiding it feels easier. Safer. Silence leaves no place to hide. No distraction to soften what rises. When everything goes quiet, what we’ve been outrunning finally has room to breathe.

I finally realized that by ignoring and delaying a long-standing family issue, I had let it grow beyond containment. It grew a life of its own. It began to shade everything I did and said. Every thought bent around it. Avoiding it didn’t protect me — it gave it power it never had.

I spent years walking on eggshells, afraid of cracking something that already felt fragile. Scared of my own shadow. It was exhausting in ways I didn’t recognize at the time. The weight seeped into every part of life, even moments that had nothing to do with the situation itself.

It took seventeen years to acknowledge it — that I was part of the problem.

Not because I caused it, but because avoiding it allowed it to rule far more than it ever should have.

Now I see the toll it’s taken. I don’t fully understand what it means yet. I only know that something has shifted. There is relief in seeing it clearly. A quiet kind of hope.

Jesus has been with me through all of it. Not rushing me. Not forcing answers. Just staying.

And for now, that is enough.

One Dreams Writing — Faith-filled reflections for life’s everyday turning points.