I was born in Romania, in the years after communism fell, when the walls came down but the silence stayed. My parents loved me the only way they knew how, which was the only way their parents had loved them: through control, through fear, through a belief that the world was something you survived, not something you enjoyed.

It wasn't their fault. It was the inheritance. Generations of suppressed emotion, unprocessed grief, and a nervous system response that said don't feel, don't ask, don't need, passed down like eye color. Nobody chose it. But everybody carried it.

I carried it too.

Where It Started

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