This piece sits within The CP Diary. It's part of a longer process of setting down what was never mine to carry.
It is something I have had to carry for decades, something that began in childhood, something I have had to learn to sit with, to lean into, without knowing about or ever fully understanding. And perhaps now, it's something that needs to be returned – not held onto, but recognised for what it is, and gently set back where it belongs.
For those who have read, and continue to read my blog, thank you. You may recognise why this feels necessary – why some things need to be written, not to revisit them, but to release what was never ours to carry. Because what was mine to live with was never the same as what was made of it. And perhaps, in recognising that, something begins to loosen.
We are born into a world where care should be certain. What follows should not be something a child has to make sense of, or be left to carry on their own, and alone.
There are stories that live quietly inside our minds, or experiences, often unspoken, reshaped over time, and repeated until they begin to feel like truth. Not because they are accurate, but because they are easier to hold than uncertainty.
Sometimes, a person can find themselves written into one of these stories without ever being asked to speak.
It doesn’t happen all at once. It begins in small shifts – conversations that happen without you. Over time, a pattern forms. You begin to question yourself, but stay quiet because the answers never come.
It doesn’t leave.
Instead, something quieter but heavier takes its place – the sense that a version of you exists somewhere that you don’t recognise, yet others accept.
Distance grows. Not loudly, but through absence. You learn to live alongside it, even without understanding it. Then, one day, everything stops.
Loss has a way of interrupting what once felt certain. It creates a silence where something you’ve lived with, but not always recognised, begins to surface – not clearly at first, but enough to unsettle what once seemed fixed.
It’s overwhelming to realise that the shape of your life has been influenced by something you never fully saw or understood. More so when that awareness arrives at a time when there is no longer anyone to ask.
There is no discussion, no confrontation, and no understanding. Only the quiet assembling of pieces long after they should have been visible.
With that comes a different kind of grief – for what can no longer be untangled, for the conversations that will never happen, for the understanding and answers that arrive too late to change anything.
But what remains is a choice. Not about what happened – because some things will never be explained or discussed, and in that case it is how you carry it forward. Whether to hold onto its weight, or to set it down without resolution.
There is a kind of strength in allowing complexity to exist without forcing clarity. In sitting with the possibility that some things may never be fully understood, or reconciled. In recognising how quietly certain absences shape what follows.
And perhaps, in the absence of answers, there is still something steady to return to – something separate from what was said, from what you’ve had to assume, and what was left behind.
Not everything can be corrected once time has moved it forward, but through reflection, clarity comes.
