I had a miscarriage when I was seventeen years old.

No one knew. No one could know. Not then. Not in the context I was living in, not with the weight of shame tied like bricks to my ankles, not with the looming fear of what telling the truth might cost me. I held it all inside like a secret I believed would poison me if spoken aloud. I couldn’t even bring myself to tell my boyfriend because I had been consistently reminded in one hundred ways by his Mother that I would hold her son’s life back by existing within it.

At seventeen, I was still a child. But I became a mother for just a moment in time—a mother who never got to hold her baby. And then I became a ghost, haunting my own body, hiding the grief so deeply inside me that it rewrote how I understood the world. How I understood myself.

For years, that loss was like a shadow stitched into my skin. I didn’t talk about it until my mid-twenties, and even then, I didn’t have the language to grieve properly. Society doesn’t give “poor white trash” permission to mourn. There’s no ritual for it. No casseroles. No prayer circles. No commemorative photo albums. You’re just supposed to get over it. Pretend it didn’t matter. Because the pain of it might make others uncomfortable. Because it’s “too much.”

This is how the world disciplines those of us who feel deeply.

Not with whips, but with dismissals. Not with chains, but with condescension. Not with cages, but with a million quiet signals that say: Don’t feel that here. Don’t be messy. Don’t make this about you.

So I learned to hide my grief beneath competence, silence, and a smile. I learned how to carry loss like it was a bad tattoo. Something I got when I was young and stupid, something I could joke about but never really explain.”

📸: My Senior Prom, 6 weeks~ after my hidden miscarriage. I wore white because the dress was supposed to double as my wedding dress that summer; I never got married because I attempted suicide instead.

– An excerpt from the book I am writing, Crashing Out: What Happens When You Stop Holding It Together