The Body Holds Curses

How emotional inheritance stains the skin from the inside out

Some of us were not taught to feel. We were taught to perform restraint. To apologize for tenderness. To laugh at need before anyone else could call it pathetic.

This is a descent. Into the body and into inheritance. Into the kind of haunting that doesn’t leave bruises but leaves echoes. It's about emotional repression disguised as maturity and detachment mistaken for strength. It’s about the long, aching crawl back toward softness.

I don’t have a neat ending for you. Just the truth that the body holds curses.
And maybe, if we’re brave, we can name them aloud.

Sometimes my emotions feel like they don’t belong to me. Not in the melodramatic sense, not oh, I’m so overwhelmed, but in the ghost story sense. Like they’re squatting in me. Like I’m haunted. Like something else cracked open in my chest decades ago and never left.

As a child, I tried to quiet myself. Flattened my reactions like bedsheets. I always felt like I had too many feelings, and I wasn’t supposed to. Too much sadness, too much joy, too much need.

I learned to clip the wings of every emotional bird that tried to lift from my ribs. People don’t like that, you know, seeing a girl fly too high on her own weather.

The curse in my emotions was whispered to me in the form of eye rolls and silence. It looked like crossed arms. Tight mouths. A home where I love you was suspicious at best, humiliating at worst. Warmth was something to apologize for. Need made you weak. Wanting made you laughable. So I learned to ration my feelings like water in a desert I wasn’t meant to survive.

I used to think it was just emotional restraint. Maturity, maybe. Stoicism. But, now I wonder if it was always something colder. Something passed down.

I apologize when I feel too brightly, especially when it's something jagged like anger or green like jealousy. I flinch at my own intensity and try to swallow it before anyone else can taste it. I am terrified of being “too much,” and yet terrified of being nothing at all.

And then the other side:

Detachment. The slow drift away from the dock of other people. A learned silence. A survival reflex dressed up like confidence. People think I’m central to their lives. Vital, magnetic. I’m looking at them like a stranger I maybe passed in a hallway once.

I have friends. Real ones, but the road for them to reach me is long and unlit, like trekking a mountain barefoot in the dark just to touch my shoulder.

And that, too, feels like a curse.

But I’m trying to fight it. I scour self-help books like they’re spellbooks, hoping one of them holds the right incantation to unfreeze me. I try to express myself out loud. Awkwardly, clumsily, bravely. I chase sparks of myself through numbness, hoping to find something still warm beneath the ash.

Writing helps. Sometimes I catch a feeling in a poem like a firefly in a jar. Sometimes I whisper a line into my notes app like my own private secret, hoping no one sees it…but also hoping someone will.

I don’t know what I’m doing.
I’m still learning how to be human again.
Or maybe for the first time.

The body holds curses, yes.
But maybe, if you dig deep enough…
if you bleed enough ink…
you find something sacred under the spell.

If this piece curled up in your chest and made itself at home or if you saw your own shadows flickering between the lines, I’d be honored if you’d subscribe.

Here, we write toward the dark. We name the ghosts. We bleed carefully, and with intention.

Subscribe to stay close.
Share if you know someone else who’s carrying a quiet curse.
And if you're already part of this circle…thank you. I see you. I’m writing for you.