“The wound is the place where the Light enters you.” ~Rumi
The first winter, I learned to lie cheerfully.
“How are you settling in?” someone would ask, and I would smile and say, “Really well, thank you.” That was the most fluent English I spoke all day.
I had left a warm, loud, crowded life and landed in a quiet apartment in a country where the cold did something to the air that made it hurt to breathe. I was a student, far from everyone who knew my name properly. I was supposed to be grateful.
And I was grateful. That was the confusing part.
People back home had pooled hope and money and prayers to get me here. My parents told relatives about me with a particular shine in their voices. How do you turn around and say you cry in the cereal aisle?
Because I did. One evening I stood in a grocery store looking for a vegetable I had eaten my whole life and could not find anywhere, under any name. Something about that small absence undid me, and I cried in front of the frozen peas like the floor had dropped away.
Then I wiped my face, bought something else, and texted my mother a photo of my “big Canadian grocery haul” with three smiley faces.
This became the shape of my days. Struggle in private, perform in public, and report home like a contented postcard. I told myself this was maturity.
It was not maturity. It was a slow, quiet disappearing.
I had an internal rulebook I never questioned. Others have had it so much harder. People would do anything to be where you are. You chose this, so you have no right to complain.
Every rule was technically true. Together, they built a small prison where my feelings were not allowed to exist, because someone, somewhere, was always suffering more.
So I kept the loneliness folded up small. I answered “I’m fine” so many times that I almost believed the words could replace the truth. They could not. The ache just went looking for other exits.
It came out as headaches and a tiredness sleep did not touch. It came out as snapping at the few people close enough to snap at, then hating myself for it. It came out as lying awake at 3 a.m., scrolling through photos of a home that was carrying on perfectly well without me.
What finally cracked me open was not dramatic. It rarely is.
A classmate I barely knew asked, “How are you, really?” and then did the thing almost nobody does. She paused. She waited through my automatic “I’m good,” and she did not fill the silence.
And for some reason, in that gap, the truth fell out of me. “Actually,” I said, “I think I’ve been really lonely. I don’t think I’m okay.”
I braced for her to look uncomfortable or to hand me a bright, useless “You’ll be fine!” Instead, her face softened, and she said, “Yeah. Me too. It’s so much harder than people admit.”
That was it. No solution, no rescue. Just one person saying, “Me too” and the prison wall turning out to be paper.
I wish I could tell you everything changed that night. It didn’t. But something small and stubborn shifted, and I started practicing a terrifying new sentence: “I’m having a hard time.”
I said it to a cousin, who admitted she had cried through her own first year abroad and never told a soul. I said it to a neighbor, who started leaving small things at my door. I said it, eventually, to a professional and learned that needing support is not the same as being broken.
Each time, the same quiet miracle. The thing I was so ashamed of turned out to be the most ordinary, human thing in the world. I had been so busy hiding my struggle that I never gave anyone the chance to meet me in it.
Here is what those years taught me and what I would gently offer you if you are pretending too.
Gratitude and grief can share the same room. You can be thankful for an opportunity and still mourn what it cost you. One feeling does not cancel the other, and you do not have to earn the right to hurt.
“Someone has it worse” is not a reason to stay silent. There will always be someone who has it worse, and there will always be someone who has it better. Neither of them is living your life. Your pain does not need a permission slip to be real.
And being seen is not the same as being weak. For years I thought strength meant needing nothing from anyone. Now I think strength is letting one trusted person see the unedited version, even when your voice shakes.
If you take one thing from this, let it be small and doable. The next time someone asks how you are, try telling exactly one safe person a slightly truer answer than “fine.”
You don’t have to explain everything. You don’t have to fall apart. You can simply say, “It’s been harder than I let on,” and see what happens in the silence afterward.
I cannot promise it will fix the cold or the distance or the strange grief of whatever you’re mourning. But I can promise this: you were never meant to carry it alone, and you were never as alone as the pretending made you feel.
The crack you’re so ashamed of might be exactly where the light gets in.
About Hareesma Amutha Venkatesan
Hareesma Amutha Venkatesan moved from India to Canada on her own and learned, slowly, that asking for help is its own kind of courage. She now helps others navigate identity, belonging, and life transitions with warmth and zero judgment. Take her free 2-minute quiz, Is It Anxiety or Burnout?, and find more gentle resources at Hap Therapy Care.
