"The Stories We Don’t Tell: Embracing Our Struggles to Find Deeper Connection"

It’s funny how we’re taught to present the best versions of ourselves to the world. Everything polished, everything put together. But what no one tells you is that the more you polish yourself, the more you lose the parts of you that actually matter. The rough edges, the flaws, the doubts—those are the things that connect us, that make us real. And we hide them because we’re scared. We’re scared of being seen as weak, scared of being judged, scared of not being enough. So we keep our struggles tucked away, private, as if they’re something to be ashamed of.

I was good at that—hiding the cracks. It was almost second nature. I’d walk into a room, and I could feel it—the expectation. The need to be more, to do more. And I lived up to it. Every damn time. But it was an act. It was always an act. The stories I didn’t tell—the things that kept me awake at night, the things that weighed on me in the quiet moments—I buried those. Because that’s what we’re taught to do.

But something changes when you’re forced to confront those stories. When life strips you down, and suddenly, all the things you didn’t want anyone to see come spilling out. That’s what happened to me. It wasn’t a grand moment of revelation. It wasn’t some life-altering event. It was a quiet breakdown, in a quiet room, with a quiet friend, and all the stories I’d been hiding came pouring out.

Viktor Frankl, in Man’s Search for Meaning, talks about suffering. He says that suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds meaning. That hit me hard. I had spent so much time trying to avoid my suffering, to push it down and ignore it, that I never considered what it could teach me. But there’s something incredibly freeing about sharing your struggles—about putting it all out there, raw and unfiltered, and realizing that you’re not alone.

The thing is, we all have stories we don’t tell. The moments when we were scared, the times we felt like we were failing, the days we wanted to quit. We hide those stories because we think they make us weak. But it’s the opposite. Those stories are what make us human. And sharing them is what makes us strong.

Sheryl Sandberg’s Option B was like a lifeline for me. She talks about resilience, about how we get through the unthinkable, not by pretending everything is fine, but by embracing the pain and letting it transform us. I had never thought about pain that way before—as something that could make me stronger. I had always seen it as something to avoid, something that made me less than. But in sharing my struggles, I found connection. Real connection. The kind that goes beyond the surface, beyond the curated image, and gets to the heart of who we are.

We live in a world that’s obsessed with appearances. We’re all putting on a show, trying to outdo each other, trying to prove we’re enough. But the truth is, none of that matters. What matters are the stories we don’t tell, the moments of vulnerability that we’re afraid to show. Because those are the moments that make us real. Those are the moments that connect us.

And that’s where the meaning is found.