It Hurts To Breathe
She didn’t remember exactly when it started hurting to breathe. Maybe it was when she was seven, standing in a church pew, told to lift her hands higher so Jesus could see her through the shame. Or maybe it was ten years later, curled in bed with the weight of secrets on her chest, the ones she wasn’t supposed to know, but somehow always did. Secrets that buzzed like bees in her ribcage. Don’t speak. Don’t ask. Don’t breathe too loud.
Either way, her lungs got the memo: survival first, oxygen second.
She was the family’s truth-teller, which is a lot like being the designated driver in a clown car full of people on denial cocktails. Her dad played the quiet victim card so well you’d think he invented it. Her mom? The director of emotional theater, complete with holy tears and passive-aggressive casserole offerings.
Their faith was conditional. Their love even more so.
She’d try to inhale around the lies — “He’s just struggling.” “She means well.” “It’s your tone, sweetie.” But it stuck in her throat every time.
She watched her big sister vanish into a marriage, as a child bride to their youth pastor, wrapped in purity culture ribbons, like a present you didn’t ask for but have to keep. Meanwhile, she stayed back, a witness to the wreckage, the scapegoat with a spine and a sense of humor, which apparently made her dangerous.
By the time she confronted her father, after her husband found him in a literal den of exploitation, she was already good at breathing through the fire. What she wasn’t prepared for was the smoke that followed. The kind that comes when people tell you you’re the problem for pointing to the burning house and yelling fire.
Her mom called it betrayal. Her dad called it confusion.
She called it Tuesday.
The betrayal didn’t knock the wind out of her, she was used to that part. What gutted her was how familiar it felt to suffocate in silence, even after doing the brave thing.
There were days her chest felt like a locked box with no key. Nights her body screamed like a siren while her mouth stayed politely closed. Breath by breath, she tried to exhale the ghosts, but they clung to her lungs like mold.
And yet.
She found people who handed her oxygen instead of judgment. She screamed into pillows, wrote pages she didn’t show anyone, and started walking herself out of the fog, one ragged inhale at a time. Healing wasn’t a straight line, more like a slow un-knotting of her windpipe while someone played doom metal in the background.
She found her breath again in unexpected places:
— In laughing too hard at trauma jokes that made other people uncomfortable.
— In whispering I believe you to someone else’s pain.
— In singing at full volume with no one around, feeling every note shake loose the parts that still flinched.
It still hurts to breathe sometimes.
But now she knows how to do it anyway.
And that? That’s power.