The shame I carried for half my life — and putting it down

For most of my life there was a sentence I could not say out loud. Not to my parents, not to my closest friends, not even, for a long time, to myself.

Here it is, finally, in plain words: as a child, I was abused. After school, my grandmother used to send me to spend time at a neighbour’s house — a place that was supposed to be safe. It wasn’t. The aunt who lived there, and her friends, hurt me. It went on for years, until I was old enough to understand what was happening and simply stopped going. I told no one. I just carried it.

And what I carried, more than the memory itself, was shame.

The strange arithmetic of shame

Here is the thing nobody warns you about. When someone harms a child, the child does not usually grow up angry at them. The child grows up ashamed of himself. Some quiet, wrong arithmetic runs in the background: if this happened to me, something must be wrong with me. I felt I should have stopped it sooner, should have spoken, should have been someone it didn’t happen to in the first place.

So I did what felt safest. I went quiet. I became an introvert who looked perfectly fine on the outside and was carefully sealed shut on the inside. At sixteen I left my small town and went to Chennai — not Bangalore, not Delhi — partly for studies, but really to go somewhere nobody knew me, somewhere I could build an identity from scratch. I told myself it was ambition. A lot of it was escape.

Shame is the only injury that convinces the victim it was their fault. That’s what makes it so durable — and so quiet.

I lived with that shame and guilt for half of my life. I want to be precise about that, because the cost was not abstract. It showed up as a low hum under everything: a reflex to assume people would eventually take advantage of me and move on. A habit of keeping everyone at a polite arm’s length. A version of me that was always managing how I appeared instead of how I actually felt.

Why silence felt like the safe option

For the longest time, staying quiet seemed effortless. It cost nothing in the moment. Speaking, on the other hand, looked terrifyingly expensive — the risk of judgement, of pity, of being seen as broken, of disturbing a family that had its own ideas about what we discuss and what we bury.

In India especially, this maths gets reinforced from every direction. We are taught that some things are not spoken about. That airing a wound is a kind of weakness, even a kind of disloyalty. So you fold it up small and tell yourself you’ve dealt with it.

But there’s a line I keep coming back to, one that runs through everything I write: what’s effortless to do is just as effortless to neglect. Silence was the effortless option, and so I neglected the one thing that actually needed tending. The wound didn’t close because I stopped looking at it. It just learned to bleed quietly.

The day the maths flipped

I’d love to tell you there was a single dramatic moment. There wasn’t. What there was, over years, was a slow accumulation of evidence that carrying this alone was not working. I tried to heal it by myself — reading, reflecting, willing it away. I wasted valuable years that way, and I say that without drama: I genuinely thought self-reliance was the brave choice. It mostly just kept me stuck.

The turn came when I started telling the truth in small, survivable doses. First to a couple of non-judgemental friends who, to their enormous credit, simply listened and didn’t flinch. Then, eventually, to a professional — which is the part I want to underline. If you are carrying something like this, you do not have to carry it alone, and a trained therapist or counsellor is not a sign of weakness but a shortcut past years you’d otherwise waste in the dark. I learned that the hard way so you don’t have to.

Here is what I noticed once I started talking. The thing I’d been protecting myself from — being seen — turned out to be exactly the thing that helped. Every time I said a true sentence out loud and the world did not end, the sentence lost a little of its power over me. Naming it shrank it. The secret had been the whole weight; the facts, spoken, were just facts.

From effort to effortless

For most of my life, the “old way” — silence — felt like the low-effort default. Speaking felt like uphill work. But that maths was a lie, because it only counted the cost of the first sentence and ignored the daily tax of carrying the secret forever.

Once I actually said the words and felt the weight lift, the comparison flipped completely. Living without the secret was so much lighter than living with it that going back became unthinkable. The effort was front-loaded, in the telling; what followed was effortless in a way silence never was. That is the whole shape of real change — the hard part isn’t permanent, it’s just first. The bridge of effort only had to be crossed once, and then a new, lighter default took its place.

And then something I didn’t expect happened. The same muscle I built facing this — the willingness to sit with something painful, name it, and not run — is the muscle I leaned on later when I lost my mother after a long illness. The healing work I’d resisted for decades turned out to be the very thing that let me grieve without breaking. Nothing is wasted. Even this.

I’m not writing this as someone who has it all figured out. I’m still travelling, not arrived. I still catch the old reflexes — the arm’s length, the assumption of betrayal. But I no longer mistake silence for safety, and I no longer carry the shame as if it were mine. It was never mine. It belonged to the people who harmed me, and I’ve handed it back.

If you’ve been carrying something for half your life too, hear this from someone on the same road: the secret is heavier than the truth. It always was. You’re allowed to put it down — and you don’t have to do it alone.

The day you say the true sentence out loud is the day it stops owning you.