The Secrets I Was Never Meant to Carry

Chapter 1: The Child Who Wasn’t Allowed to Be One

From my earliest memories, I was holding onto secrets that didn’t belong to me, secrets that felt too heavy for even adults to carry. I learned to walk lightly, speak softly, and avoid eye contact. I wasn’t given room to cry or space to wonder. I wasn’t given the freedom to explore, dream, or make mistakes.

Instead, I was expected to keep the house quiet. To keep emotions hidden and to avoid being a problem. I wasn’t the one they nurtured and I was the one they managed.

Other kids were spilling juice, building forts, and falling asleep in laps that loved them.
They had parents who wiped their tears and held their hands.
I was wiping my own tears, trying to hold myself together when the world felt like it was collapsing.

Chapter 2: A Life Too Heavy for an 7-Year-Old

By the time I was seven, I already knew how to read a room better than most adults.
I watched facial expressions, monitored tone, and learned how to predict moods, all to avoid conflict. I became hyper-aware, constantly scanning for danger even in silence.

While other children had bedtime stories and warm dinners, I was figuring out which adult in the house might explode next. There was no consistency, no safety no one stepping in to say, “You’re just a kid, this isn’t yours to carry.”

And so, I carried it. All of it. I carried the weight of broken promises, of slammed doors, of men who came and went, and of family members too wrapped in their dysfunction to notice the little girl drowning in plain sight. I learned not to need too much. Not to cry too loudly. Not to ask for anything I didn’t already think I could survive without.

I was a child.
But I wasn’t allowed to be one. That truth still echoes and still even now.

Chapter 3: A Life Too Heavy for an 8-Year-Old

At eight years old, I was doing what grown adults failed to do for me.

My mother cycled through partners. Each one entered our lives with more baggage, more silence, and less regard for my presence. My father drank himself numb and left no space for my feelings. My stepmothers layered sweetness with manipulation, sometimes with hands, sometimes with words.

There were no hot meals waiting. No bedtime stories. No one noticing if I was too quiet or hurting. So, I tried and failed figured it out. I wore wet school uniforms because no one remembered to dry them. I made my own food, basic but food including toasted sandwiches, pasta, anything I could handle without burning the house down.
I tried baking just to feel like someone might celebrate me, even if I had to do it myself.

No child should have to cook their own comfort. But for me, it was survival.
And I didn’t even know I was living in a form of quiet neglect, because no one told me it was wrong.

Chapter 4: The Sister Who Wasn’t a Sister

Then came my sister, my only sibling, the one person who should’ve felt like home. We shared the same separation, the same abandonment, the same storm. But she turned cold, demanding, hard. She played parent when Mum was absent, which was most of the time  but she didn’t protect me. She ruled me.

Sitting on the couch, she would snap her fingers like I was a servant: “Get me water. Hand me the remote. Go pick that up.”
If I hesitated — she kicked. If I refused — she grabbed. If I cried — she mocked.
She would call me stupid. Worthless. Useless.

And yet, I held out hope during the brief flickers of sisterhood. The rare times she would laugh with me or talk like we were equals. But those moments always ended. The switch always flipped. And I always paid the price for believing it was safe to trust her again.

Chapter 5: The Day I Knew I Wasn’t Safe

There’s a moment in every survivor’s story when something clicks, when survival mode stops feeling like resilience and starts feeling like betrayal. For me, that moment came the day I said “no.”

It was just another day in the house. Another day of demands, tension, and carefully monitoring everyone's moods. My sister asked me for something, another command disguised as a request and for the first time in a long time, I refused.

I was tired. Exhausted from years of being bossed, bruised, belittled. I had started pushing back, slowly, one breath at a time. I was trying to stand up for myself, to find my voice again. I didn’t even raise my tone. I just said “no.”

But “no” was a threat to someone who fed on control. She turned toward me, her entire body stiff with fury. Her face was twisted, rage contorting every feature. She charged like a storm that had been building for years.

Before I could react, she shoved me hard into the door. My back hit it with a thud that echoed through the hallway. I stand up, shocked but unwilling to crumble. So, I pushed back, it wasn’t aggression it was self-defence. I was trying to protect myself, not fight her. I just wanted space. I just wanted the violence to stop, but something in her snapped, I saw it, a darkness I’d never fully understood until that second. Her eyes went empty. Cold. No recognition. No mercy.

She grabbed me by the arms, and with all her weight and fury, she slammed me backwards, right into the window.

The second-floor glass shattered around me. Pain ripped across my back, sharp and cold. I could feel the edge. The outside. The space where I could have fallen and never come back. If I hadn’t instinctively locked my legs and braced myself, I would’ve gone over the ledge, straight off the second story of our townhouse and that would have been it. No warnings, no pause, no regret from her. Just a final act of rage and silence where I once existed.

The sound of breaking glass woke the neighbours, people came rushing out, their faces horrified. But by then, she was gone, she ran. Disappeared down the street like a child who broke a dish, not a person who almost broke her sister’s life. Only did she hide at a nearby friend’s house for three days. Played the victim. Spun her story first.

And I?

I was left with blood drying in the folds of my clothes.
With glass in my skin.
With questions burning in my chest that no one cared to answer.

No one bandaged me.
No one held me.
No one said, “This wasn’t your fault.”

My mother came home, didn’t ask what happened only saw the broken window and screamed. Not because of what it meant. Not because her youngest daughter had almost died. She screamed because it would cost money to fix, she screamed at me the while in pain. So, I swept the glass, cleaned the blood, gathered my things and the next morning I got up, got dressed, and went to school like nothing happened.

Because there was no space in that house for me to fall apart.