I Grew Up Thinking I Was Broken. Here's What I Know Now.

I grew up believing two things about myself that weren't true. That I was broken. And that broken people don't get to take up space.

Neither of those beliefs came from nowhere.

I grew up in Appalachia, in a culture I loved and that often didn't know what to do with me. I was different in ways that were hard to name. I had orthopedic disabilities that weren't always visible. I carried gifts that frightened people. In the second grade, I was expelled for praying healing over a classmate. It took. And that combination — invisible disability, visible difference, real gifts — made me exactly the kind of target that predators recognize from across all boundaries.

I know what it means to be hunted in the places that should have been safe.

I didn't have language for any of this back then. I just knew I felt wrong. Broken. Too much and not enough at the same time. What I know now is that I was quietly cracking — long before I had a name for it.

What Is Quiet Cracking, Really?

Quiet Cracking is what happens when life asks more of you than you have resources to meet. When the gap between what you're carrying and what you're supported to carry gets wide enough — and stays wide enough, long enough — something in you starts to give.

Not all at once. That's the thing. It's not a single break. It's a slow erosion. A dimming. The part of you that used to believe in your own worth starts to go quiet. The part that used to trust your own perception starts to second-guess everything. The part that used to reach out starts to pull back.

For me, that erosion had a name I gave it myself: crippled and crazy. That's how I talked about myself. Inside, and sometimes out loud. Not because it was true. Because it was the story the world around me kept handing back. And because I hadn't yet learned that I got to put that story down.

The Story Isn't the Truth

Here's what I've learned in four decades of this work — and in the decades of living that came before it.

The story we carry about ourselves when we're in Quiet Cracking is not a diagnosis. It's a survival adaptation. It's what the mind does when it's trying to make sense of pain it doesn't have a framework to hold.

Calling myself crippled and crazy was my nervous system trying to explain why things were so hard. It was the best story I had with the tools I had at the time. But it wasn't true. And living inside an untrue story is exhausting. It costs you in ways you can't even track — because you don't know yet how much of your energy is going to maintaining a narrative that doesn't fit.

If you're carrying a story like that about yourself right now, I want you to hear this: that story made sense once. It protected you. And you're allowed to outgrow it. That's where the real journey begins. Not in fixing yourself. In getting honest about what you've been carrying — and deciding, for the first time maybe, to set some of it down.

If this resonates, you're not alone — and you don't have to stay here. Visit http://the-tia.org to explore the path forward, or reach out to book a consultation or speaking engagement.