He was an angry man. That was the atmosphere of the house. Not loud all the time, but present most of the time. Like something waiting to be set free from a rage that had been cooped up in a cage. You could feel it on the floorboards of the old three-story house. You could feel it in the way the air shifted when he entered a room. You could feel it in your body before you understood it with your mind.
One afternoon, I heard it. The floorboards creaked underneath my feet in protest as I walked across my bedroom floor on the third floor. I was trying desperately to be quiet as I had already known my father was in a mood that day. I had spent all morning in my room avoiding his anger. And then a small ordinary sound. All at once it came; Sharp. Loud. Angry. An explosion of force that did not match a small creak of a floorboard. My father yelled,
“Be Quiet!”
And everything inside me stopped. My father had not just called out those words; he had commanded them, from a simple floorboard creak. My reaction was immediate. I froze.
Freezing is not just standing still. It is your body flooding all at once; overwhelmed with emotional fear and dread all colliding in the same second. It is knowing something is coming and being unable to move toward safety and away from danger. It is bracing your body and your mind without choosing to brace. It is your mind being flooded with a million warning signals all at once and not being able to make sense of any if it but just knowing that you are in danger in the present moment, and you are just not sure of where the danger is coming from. So, your body freezes, but your mind is racing with so many thoughts that you cannot make sense of any of them. You try and slow your breathing, but you can’t. Your heart is pounding inside your chest. Your ears are ringing so loud it is the only sound you hear besides the deafening silence where you try and process any other noise out of place that may make the danger more present or known.
My muscles tightened. My breath was held. I had to remind myself to breathe as my breathe had caught in my throat. Very slowly, very quietly. Otherwise I would pass out and make even more noise. My hands began shaking even as the rest of me locked in place. I heard the clock on the wall begin to tick so loud in my ears as it echoed the sound of the heart in my chest. Tick. Tick. Tick. Each second felt louder than it should have. The ticking filled the room. It felt amplified, like the whole house had gone silent just to hear it. It was as if everyone in the house had taken in a breath and was afraid to exhale. Time seems to stand still in that moment when anger and rage fill the rooms in the house and danger is ever present.
I stood there for ten minutes, listening for the sound of my father’s footsteps. Would he come for me? Would I be safe? Would this moment pass? Ten minutes of calculating danger without making a sound. In that moment I felt small. Not young. If anything, I felt older than I should have. Too aware, too responsible. Too conscious of the consequences for a child’s body. Small in power; small in safety. I felt like I needed to shrink into something so small I could slip between the cracks in the floorboards. So small I would not register as a presence. So small I would not trigger anything dangerous. But I was painfully aware of how big I was. How loud my breathing sounded. How much space my body occupies in that room. How impossible it was to fold myself out of existence. There was nowhere to hide in that moment. I was in the middle of the room too scare to move off of the floorboard that had creaked. Nowhere inside myself to hide. Taking up space felt like exposure and exposure felt like risk. I listened for ten minutes standing there frozen on that floorboard that had creaked. Waiting for the footsteps of my father to come up those stairs. Waiting for the rage to escalate. Waiting for the danger to become more real.
Thankfully, that day it didn’t. That day it did not escalate into more than the scream from my father. But that did not excuse the experience of being fearfully overwhelmed in those ten minutes of frozen terror at the sound of my father’s voiced anger. I tried to minimize it at that age. Saying he must have been stressed that day. That I could have been quieter. But looking back I see that the response that I got for a squeaky floorboard was disproportionate to the level of the incident. That is the key.
That is what permission to hurt begins with. Not with bruises. Not with explanations. Not even with words. It begins quietly. With the internal realization that what you are carrying is real. Even the natural sound of walking across my bedroom floor can trigger something dangerous. That your body reacts before your mind does. That your fear response is not exaggerated. Permission to call it hurt is not an exaggeration. It is truth, your truth. And the cost of denying that truth is enormous. It costs you your very soul. Because when you minimize the hurt you went through, you also minimize yourself. Permission to hurt is the first rebellion. It is the first crack in silence. It is the moment you stop saying,
“It wasn’t that bad.”
And start saying,
“It mattered.”
It mattered that I froze. It mattered that I shook. It mattered that I stood still for ten minutes listening to danger. It mattered that I learned, at a youthful age, that sound could mean danger. Permission to hurt is not weakness; it is clarity, and clarity is the beginning of freedom.