On Assumptions and the Right to Tell Our Own Stories

One of the deepest harms we do to each other is assuming we know someone, that the stories we construct in our minds about others are true. We often try to tell people who they are, even after they’ve shared how painful it is to be defined by others over and over. In doing this, we replicate what the systems of this world have done since birth: silencing, stripping the right to shape one's own story, to rewrite and return to it as often as needed.

The worst thing you can do is tell someone who they are, and I don’t mean the healthy practice of helping loved ones see themselves when they’re lost to their own pain. Sometimes, yes, we need to "read" each other, to hold up a mirror to behaviors that hurt both them and us. But to tell someone who they are at their core—that’s a line we should never cross. We don’t know. Often, they’ve been trying to tell us all along. If we stop taking things so personally, we might see others' actions not as an attack on us, but as a cry for help, a battle within themselves.

We must acknowledge that just as we have kin fighting autoimmune diseases, we have kin whose minds are also attacking them—not because they are wrong, flawed, or disposable, but because they were vulnerable. They were chosen by the systems of oppression for intense reprogramming, for reshaping, often because they came from families that, unable to listen to their own truths, couldn’t listen to theirs.

I remember middle school friendships with young Black girls who, for some reason, dismissed my pain, treating my feelings as if they were over-the-top or unworthy. They thought I was privileged because I occasionally had a $100 bill on me, not knowing I was only allowed to spend $20 and that no part of that money was for sharing with my siblings. They weren’t with us on the rare days we got to go on adventures, to have a dinner out, to be in nature for a while. No one really understood the relationships I was navigating, the survivor’s guilt I was carrying.

My guilt wasn't about the sacrifices my ancestors made—it was the shame of being the only one in private school, of being the one invited out by other moms for playdates, of learning how to "earn" what I needed by rarely asking for anything. It was the emotional hunger games, and I quickly learned the rules: stay silent, absorb the anger, cry it out where no one could see. I learned how to let my tears carry the frustration away even if their imprint remained, a wound beneath the surface.

People don’t talk about the scars left behind, the concaving of the emotional body. Every time I was hurt or humiliated, it was like a boulder thrown into my sea of feelings—a void left behind that time would eventually fill, but a mark all the same. I learned not to show anger, to keep sadness brief and silent, to hold myself responsible for how others treated me. I grew up believing that my pain was my fault, too ashamed to seek protection from my father, who was often the source of my shame.

How could I trust him to protect me when he couldn’t even protect me from himself? The same man who would strike me over spilled water or the breakage of a shower rod, who called me names, who told me I was a failure even as I got into college—how could he shield me when he couldn’t shield me from his own anger?

My instinct to sacrifice myself for others has been hard to let go of. For so long, I’ve cared more about protecting other people’s feelings than honoring my own truth. I knew that if I started to tell this story, I might lose everything and everyone. That fear kept me silent, my voice stifled by the weight of wanting to preserve the comfort of others who claimed to love me but never really knew what that meant.

But now, I don’t care. I’m done censoring myself. I’m tired of keeping silent to make space for people who don’t truly see me. This book is a testament to that choice—a choice to stop silencing myself for others, a choice to honor my own voice, no matter what it may cost.