My daughter called a few weeks ago to tell me she’d lost her job, and before she’d even finished the sentence, I heard myself say, “You’ll be fine, you always land on your feet, what’s the plan?”
Brisk. Useful. The kind of thing you say to someone you have full confidence in.
I heard her go still on the other end for a second — just her deciding, the way she learned to long ago, that there wasn’t much point in telling me the rest.
I’m 70. I have spent most of those years proud of how little I need handling. I came up hard, I came out of it unbreakable, and I wore that proudly for fifty years. But sitting there with the phone and hearing my own daughter go carefully, I had the thought I’d spent half a century stepping around: the thing I’ve been proudest of is the same thing that’s been keeping people out the entire time.
The house I grew up in had no patience for tears
If I cried as a kid, my father’s instinct was to hand me a better reason to.
“I’ll give you something to cry about” wasn’t a threat in our house; it was a procedure.
Dinner came after the chores, never before, and if the chores were done badly, they were done again, and dinner waited however late it needed to. Comfort wasn’t withheld so much as it had never been on the menu — a scraped ankle, a dead pet, a friend who’d turned on me, all got the same flat instruction to quit making a thing of it. And complaining was the one move guaranteed to backfire.
Say the woodpile was too heavy and you’d be shown exactly how heavy a thing could get; the complaint got answered with more of whatever you’d complained about, until it stopped occurring to me that complaint was something a person was allowed to do.
I want to be fair to my dad and my mom, too, because none of it came wrapped in meanness, or at least it didn’t feel that way from the inside. My parents believed they were doing me a kindness — filing down the soft parts before the world could get to them less gently.
Psychologists have a name for a home that runs this way. They call it emotion dismissing: a household where a child’s feelings are treated as a problem to be shut down rather than something to be met. You learn the lesson early, and you learn it well — the feeling is the liability. Kill the feeling, and the problem goes with it.
For decades, I thought being unbreakable was the best thing about me
And I had the evidence to back it up.
When my mother died, I planned the funeral and was back at work on Monday.
When my marriage ended, I told everyone I was doing fine and did such a convincing job of it that I half believed myself.
When the cancer turned up six years ago, I scheduled the surgery around my work calendar and told my daughter there was no need to fly in.
I don’t need anyone. Never have. That was the whole of my self-image, and people fed it — they called me strong so often that I took the word for my entire personality.
What I couldn’t see was the bill running underneath all that competence.
After my divorce, there was someone I was with for about six years, in my forties. When it ended, I had the explanation ready and tidy: she wanted more than I had to give, she needed too much, we were after different things. All true enough. What the explanation left out was that she’d spent six years knocking and getting the hard version of me, and that she finally took me at my word when I kept insisting there was nothing behind it worth the trouble.
There was a friend, the closest one I had, who, over a couple of years, simply stopped calling. I put it down to his move, his new job, the ordinary way friendships thin out over time. I never once counted how many times he’d opened a real conversation and gotten a joke or a change of subject back from me.
There was even a job that slipped away from me, which I blamed on a manager who had it in for me. Closer to the truth: nobody could tell what I was thinking, ever, so nobody trusted me with the kind of work that needs a person you can read.
Every one of these came with its own reason, and the reasons were sound, and every last one of them pointed at somebody else. It took me a long while to notice that the one thing standing in the middle of all of them was me. I just didn’t have a word yet for what I was doing.
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Putting a name to it rearranged how I saw my own life
Recently, I came across the term for it, and a good term does a particular thing: it lifts a pattern you’ve been living inside up to where you can finally look at it.
It’s called expressive suppression — the habit of clamping down on the outward show of a feeling, keeping your face and your voice level while something darker happens underneath.
For most of my life, I’d assumed that was the same thing as not feeling much. I was wrong about that. Suppressing the expression does nothing to the feeling itself; the feeling stays put, walled off, quietly costing you to keep it down.
And the clamp doesn’t get to choose what it stops. The same grip I’d built to keep grief and fear and need from showing was holding back everything on the warm end of things right along with them. You don’t get to go numb on only the side you don’t like.
That explained something I’d never been able to account for. It wasn’t only that people left me. It was that even the ones who stayed — my daughter, the one friend who kept calling well past the point I’d earned it — couldn’t get to me either.
They’d put something warm in front of me, and it would meet the same flat surface, and where the warmth should have gotten through, I’d feel a kind of nothing, and I’d take the nothing as evidence I was fine. I wasn’t fine. I was sealed, and I’d spent a lifetime calling it strength.
I can’t undo any of it, so I’ve settled for something smaller
I’m not going to pretend a person rewrites themselves at 70. I’ve read all the things that promise it’s never too late, and I don’t fully buy them.
The reflex is older than my previous marriage and older than my kids; it’s as old as I am, and it still fires. Someone moves in close, and the level, capable version of me steps out front like a bodyguard.
But I’ve found one thing small enough to be possible. When my daughter calls now, and I feel the brisk answer loading, I make myself wait three seconds and say the warmer thing instead — “that sounds hard,” or “I’m sorry, tell me the rest,” or sometimes nothing at all, which, coming from me, is its own kind of admission. It is the most uncomfortable thing I do in any given week.
I’m not flinging myself open to everyone. That would be rash. I’m letting one person in, on purpose, in small amounts, and I’ve watched her loosen by degrees as she works out that I might answer for real now.
It’s not a transformation. It’s one stubborn old person choosing the harder reply inside a three-second window, a few times a week. I would rather end up a little less hardened and a little more known.
Editor’s Note: “As Told to Bolde” stories are inspired by reader submissions, interviews, and accounts shared with our editorial team. Details are often changed, combined, or dramatized, and our editors use AI tools in the writing process. See our Editorial Policy.
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