Letting the Hidden Out: A Story I Kept Even From Myself

Long before I had the language, before diagnoses or frameworks, there was just this: a memory, a body, and a truth I never knew how to tell.

Sharing = Caring

Secrets are locked up,

Hidden without a key.

Pieces of a puzzle,

They’re what’s inside me.

Let them out, set them free.

I wrote those lines on Sunday, 19 January 2025, just minutes after stepping out of the shower. They came fast, like they had been waiting for decades, just behind the surface of my skin.

What followed was not just a thought or a sensation. It was a flood.

Memories arrived from the 90s. The 80s. And from somewhere even younger than that, as far back as I can remember. They did not ask permission or make room for denial. They just sat in the quiet with me, clear and undeniable.

I stood still, poem in hand, water cooling on my back, and realised I had just unlocked a story I had spent my entire life trying not to see.

The Shower That Opened the Door

Music was playing softly in the background, What Would You Call Yourself by Fink. I had gone days without a proper shower. Friday? Saturday? I was not sure. But when the water finally hit me, something opened. A sensory shift. A pause in time. And suddenly, I was no longer just a man under a shower.

I was a child again.

A bathroom from decades ago. A toilet I had sat on countless times. The same shock of red that no one ever explained. No one ever understood. Not even me.

It was not a memory I had forgotten. It was one I had learned to bury.

A Private Mystery

The bleeding did not start at puberty. It started long before that. It goes back to childhood, years before I had any understanding of how bodies work, or what was supposed to be normal.

As a young kid, I told my parents. I cannot remember exactly what they said, only the quiet that followed. I learned early: if no one makes sense of it for you, you start making sense of it on your own.

By the time puberty arrived, I had already formed a story:

Maybe this is just my version of a period. Maybe boys have something like it too.

It was not an informed conclusion. It was a coping strategy. A way to turn confusion into a shape I could hold.

And because no one ever corrected me, the story stuck.

Shame grows where truth cannot find language.

By 14, I had stopped asking questions. The bleeding became something I endured. Alone. Often in silence. Hidden behind bathroom doors, school uniforms, and late night toilet visits I never told anyone about.

From then on, I held two truths:

I was a boy.

Something about my body did not match what I had been told boys were like.

But I did not dare let anyone into that conflict. So the story stayed locked inside me.

Decades of Carrying

The bleeding never completely stopped. It would flare, subside, return, then disappear for a while. It haunted me through adolescence, early adulthood, and into my thirties. I lived with it quietly. Made peace with the discomfort. Managed the shame.

Then at 40, it became unmanageable. Pain pushed me beyond pride.

I booked a GP visit. I remember the moment he asked how long I had had the symptoms. I lied:

Only a few months.

It had been over thirty years.

The surgeon, Rupert, diagnosed a fistula and scheduled surgery. When he asked the same question, I lied again. It felt easier to carry a falsehood than carry the full truth of my silence.

Surgery worked. Physically, I healed. Emotionally, the shame stayed put. I never made it to the follow up appointment. I just moved on. Glad it was fixed. Avoiding everything else it had touched.

Because the more haunting part was not the condition. It was how long I had lived with it. Alone. In silence.

What the Body Holds When the Mind Cannot

In that shower in 2025, something broke open. The memories did not arrive with rage or regret, but with recognition.

The bleeding had been a message.

The silence had been a shield.

The story I had told myself was the only one I had.

What I did not realise until that morning was this:

It was never just a medical story.

It was an identity story.

A story about who I thought I was, and who I was not allowed to be.

The Pause Before the Reckoning

There is more to this. About the ways we learn to shrink. The stories we build in missing light. The dignity we withhold from ourselves when we do not know better.

Before there were names like ADHD or autism or neurodivergent, there was just this:

A boy with a question.

A teenager with a secret.

An adult with a wound he kept hidden longer than anyone should.

Part 2 is where the language finally appears. Where shame stops being a shadow and becomes a signal. Where the past meets the present, and identity starts to make sense through a wider lens.

To be continued.