Imagine you’re six years old, and you love playing outside.
One day, you put on your favorite shoes, but somehow, they’re on the wrong feet. You don’t realize it—you’re just a kid. All you know is that something feels off. Running feels clumsy, jumping hurts, and even riding your bike makes your feet ache.
At first, you keep playing, hoping the feeling will go away. But as the days go by, the discomfort turns into pain. Blisters form on your toes, your knees ache, and you start to avoid the games you once loved.
When you take your shoes off, you notice how awkwardly they sit on the floor. But you don’t know what’s wrong. How could you? You’re only six.
You try to tell your parent that something hurts, but they don’t notice your shoes. They tell you to toughen up.
“You’re fine,” they say.
You go to the doctor, but they don’t see it either. They call it growing pains and send you home with a cream, never once asking to see how you put on your shoes.
So you stop talking about it. You stop playing too. It hurts too much now.
Your parent gets frustrated, nagging you to go outside and have fun, but you cry because they don’t understand—it’s not fun anymore. The pain has taken that from you. You start to believe the pain is normal, that maybe you’re the problem.
Nobody has asked the right questions. Nobody has looked at your shoes.
The Invisible Pain of Abuse
This is what it’s like to grow up in a family with abuse.
The hurt doesn’t always show in obvious ways. It’s there, buried in silence and confusion. A child doesn’t understand why things feel wrong—they only know that they do. But the adults around them don’t see it. They don’t ask the right questions.
So the child learns to live with the pain.
They stop talking, stop playing, stop hoping that anyone will notice. And as they grow, the pain shapes them. It changes the way they walk through life, even if no one else can see it.
So the child grows up carrying a secret they didn’t even know they had—a quiet pain that no one ever thought to name. All they ever wanted was for someone to notice, to ask,
“What’s wrong?”
And to listen when they tried to answer.
What If Someone Had Noticed?
What if someone had noticed the shoes?
What if someone had asked, “Why does it hurt?”
What if someone had looked closer and said, “Show me how you wear them”?
The pain could have been stopped.
The child could have been free.
Sometimes, the answers are in plain sight.
We just have to ask the right questions.
Tanya.
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