It Grows Teeth

“What you can’t say owns you. what you hide controls you.” — something my brother Mustafa kept as a bio, somewhere around 2016

I hate to admit this. but what you hide grows teeth.

What you keep running from, intentionally or not, will not slide. it will not dissolve into the background while you stay busy. I tried. growth mindset, grinding, goals, achievements, love, every good thing I managed to build or receive, none of it could outweigh what I was hiding. and for most of my life I couldn’t name it. I couldn’t find a single word for it other than monster. something inside me that isn’t me, but not quite different either. it comes from within, so it is mine. it is embedded and woven into who I am. and yet I feel trapped in a body that doesn’t want to obey my thoughts, and my thoughts collapse sometimes without warning. and I no longer know what it feels like to simply be. of all these versions of me, the one who grinds, the one who hides, the one who runs, the one writing this, I don’t know which one is real.

What I’ve come to understand is that all of these feelings are a byproduct of the monster. and the monster is a byproduct of avoidance. I created it. not by visiting it, by pretending it wasn’t there. every time I looked away, I fed it something. every year I stayed in motion, I gave it more room to grow. you don’t feel it happening. you just wake up one day and realize the thing you ignored has been making decisions for you for a long time.

I told myself that if I kept moving, kept becoming, I would be a moving target, too fast to be pulled back into that hole. but I was lying to myself. because what I’m running from isn’t behind me. it isn’t outside me. it is me. and you cannot outrun something that lives in your chest. the faster you move, the more distance you put between yourself and the parts of you that need to be heard, and the louder they have to become to reach you.

What you hide doesn’t stay hidden. it grows. it learns the shape of your defenses. it waits. and the most terrifying moment isn’t when you finally face it, it’s the moment you catch a glimpse of it in the dark and realize it has been there, shaping you, long before you were ready to admit it existed. you’ve only seen the tail. and the tail alone is enough to break something open in you.

I wish if I had a clean ending to offer here. I’m still in it. but I know this now: the hiding was never protection. it was just postponement . and everything I postponed is still waiting.