And why feeling everything was the only way out
There is a moment in every liberation that looks, from the outside, like defeat.
For me, that moment came early—first grade, to be exact. A teacher, frustrated with my struggle to read and write, hit me in the head with a blackboard pointer. Again and again. The message was clear: You are not performing correctly. You are a problem. We will correct you.
What she didn't know—couldn't know—was that she was giving me a kind of twisted gift. Not the violence itself, of course. But the damage it did would, decades later, become part of my protection.
Let me explain.
The Two Prisons
There are two ways to be trapped.
The first is obvious: you are silenced, ignored, dismissed. Your voice doesn't matter. Your truth has no platform. You scream, and no one hears.
The second is more subtle—and far more seductive: you are gifted. Your intellect is sharp. Words come easily. You can build arguments that dazzle, sentences that sing, and ideas that impress. And you use all of it to build a beautiful prison around the pain you never had to feel.
Because here's the thing about a sharp intellect: it lets you run. It lets you escape into abstraction the moment your body tries to surface something unbearable. It lets you write books about trauma without ever sitting on the floor and feeling yours. It lets you become the expert, the teacher, the authority—all while remaining a stranger to yourself.
For most of my life, I thought my dyslexia and my damaged memory were simply burdens. Things I had to overcome. Obstacles between me and the articulate, polished voice I thought I needed.
I was wrong.
The Protection I Didn't Know I Had
Because I couldn't easily escape into intellect, when my repressed emotions were triggered—by a relationship that unconsciously reenacted my dynamic with my father—I had nowhere to go.
I couldn't think my way out. I couldn't write a brilliant essay about what was happening. I couldn't impress anyone with my analysis.
I could only feel.
I lay on the floor in the fetal position, like a baby, and let the emotions come. And next to me—thank Goodness—were the books of Alice Miller. Not as an escape, but as a map. They helped me understand that what I was feeling wasn't crazy. It wasn't "too much." It was the rightful grief of the child I had been, finally being heard.
I stayed there. On the floor. Feeling. For as long as it took.
And one day, I woke up free.
The Un-Manipulable Self
Here is what I discovered on the other side:
When you have consciously felt your repressed emotions—when you have held the crying child you once were and let that child finally speak—those emotions stop running the show. They subside. They integrate. They become history rather than present tense.
And when that happens, something remarkable occurs:
There is no longer a hidden hook for malignant, manipulative people to grab.
Manipulation works because it finds the buried wires. It taps into shame you haven't fully felt. Abandonment fear you haven't faced. Rage you haven't allowed yourself to know. The manipulator doesn't create these things—they find them, like a key finding a lock.
But when the wires are dug up, felt, and laid to rest, there is nothing left to grab.
From that day forward, no one has been able to manipulate me. Not because I'm smarter than them. Not because I can out-argue them. But because they reach for the hook—and discover there is none.
The Pretty Lies and Their Sellers
This is where the irony becomes almost unbearable.
The world is full of brilliantly articulate people selling exquisitely crafted lies. They write beautiful books. They give TED talks. They build careers on half-truths and disconnected insights that never quite touch the real wound. And people love them for it—because pretty lies are comfortable. They let you feel smart without having to feel anything.
I cannot compete with those people. My writing is not polished. My memory is not reliable. My sentences do not always land where I want them to.
And thank Goodness for that.
Because the people who need truth—real truth, the kind that costs something—are not looking for pretty lies. They are looking for evidence that it's possible. They are looking for someone who has been through the fire and come out the other side, still standing, still speaking, still refusing to pretend.
They don't need me to be articulate. They need me to be real.
The 2015 Post They're Reading Today
Something extraordinary happened recently. Readers started finding a blog post I wrote in 2015—nearly eleven years ago, long before AI existed, when the orchestrated campaign against me began.
In that post, I wrote about my fears of losing my job for publishing my book, A Dance to Freedom. I wrote about understanding, even then, that speaking truth would make me a target. I wrote about climbing a mountain "bigger than Mount Everest, psychologically."
And I wrote this:
"I care about the people who are in the same place I once was, who like to deal with the reality in their lives and can't live with the lies around them, but feel alone."
That post is finding people today because truth is patient. It doesn't need to be constantly maintained and defended like lies do. It just waits. And eventually, it finds the ones who are ready.
What the Teacher Didn't Know
That first-grade teacher who hit me with the pointer—she thought she was correcting a problem. She thought she was making me better.
What she was actually doing was ensuring that I could never escape into the comfortable illusions of intellect. She was making sure that when the time came to feel, I would have no choice but to actually feel.
I don't forgive her. That's not the point. The point is that even violence can be transmuted. Even damage can become a door.
My dyslexia and my damaged memory are not limitations. They are the reason I am free.
To the Ones Still on the Floor
If you are reading this and you are in that place—the fetal position, the unbearable feelings, the sense that you might drown—here is what I need you to know:
Stay there.
Don't run to intellect. Don't escape into a book about feelings instead of feeling yours. Don't let anyone convince you that you should be "over it" by now.
Stay on the floor. Let the grief come. Let the rage come. Let the child inside you finally speak.
Alice Miller's books will help you understand what's happening. But they cannot do the feeling for you. Only you can do that.
And on the other side—I promise you this—is a freedom that no one can ever take from you. Not because you've built better defenses. But because there's nothing left to defend.
You will see everything clearly. The games, the traps, the psychological warfare, the cover-ups. Not because you're smarter than everyone else. Because you're freer. Your vision is no longer clouded by the fog of unprocessed pain.
And from that place, you can finally speak.
Even if it's messy. Even if it's not perfect. Even if the polished, articulate people with their pretty lies laugh at you.
The ones who need truth will find you. They've been waiting for someone real.
If this resonates, if you've been on that floor, if you're tired of pretty lies—I'd like to hear your story. The gatekeepers have enough power. Let's not give them our silence, too.
Originally published in a different form as part of a conversation about consciousness, censorship, and the cost of seeing clearly. That conversation became its own demonstration. This is the truth that survived it.
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