I’ve thought about this more than I expected to. Not in a way where I’m looking for blame… just trying to understand it. Because looking back now, there were moments.

Small ones.

Things that didn’t sit right. Things I noticed… but didn’t say out loud. And I keep asking myself the same question. Why didn’t I speak up? I don’t think it was because I didn’t see it.

I think I felt it long before I understood it. But feeling something and trusting it…are two very different things.

It was easier to question myself. To tell myself I was overthinking. That I was reading too much into it. That it wasn’t a big deal. So I stayed quiet.

Not because I didn’t have something to say…but because I wasn’t sure I was allowed to say it. Had I become a people pleaser?…And the longer you do that, the harder it becomes to change it.

Because silence starts to feel safer than being wrong. Safer than creating tension. Safer than disrupting something that already feels fragile. Even if that silence slowly costs you something. I think part of me believed that if I just handled it better…

if I stayed calm…

if I didn’t react…then things would settle.

But they didn’t. And now, looking back, I’m starting to understand that speaking up was never just about saying something out loud.

It was about trusting myself enough to believe it mattered.

I’m still learning that. Still learning what it feels like to listen to something inside me without immediately questioning it. And maybe that’s where it starts.

Not in saying everything perfectly…but in not ignoring it completely.