Letter 2 — Why I Told No One
The one time I tried to speak, the words that came out weren’t mine. And the person who heard them went immediately to the other side.
Last week I told you about the nun, the cult word, and my first reaction — which was resistance.
There were five months of silence before that conversation. Five months during which I told no one what had happened. This is about why.
Why No One Could Reach Me
From the outside, the rational question is: why didn’t you leave when people told you it was wrong?
Friends who said cult. Monks who said this doesn’t sound right. Other shamans. The nun. My parents. Her friends. People who heard fragments of the story and said: that sounds off.
I didn’t believe any of them.
Not because I was stupid. Not because I was weak. Because the system had already provided the interpretation for exactly that moment. When someone from outside says it sounds wrong, the system hands you the answer before you need to think: they don’t understand the dynamics. They’re not inside this. They can’t see what you can see from here.
The friends who said cult — they don’t have the full context. The monks — a different spiritual framework. The other shamans — professional jealousy. The nun — she only heard part of the story. My parents — the shaman had already told me they were frauds, their concern was not to be trusted. Her friends — they only know one side.
Every alarm that arrived from outside became, inside the system, confirmation that the system was right. That I was surrounded by people who loved me too much to see me clearly. That only the shaman had the perception to locate what was actually there.
The system had pre-answered every outside voice before it arrived.
Looking back, this was probably Exhibit A.
And underneath all of that was something deeper. I didn’t believe the people defending me because I genuinely believed they couldn’t see what the system could see. The shaman had found the wound: the hollow, the mother’s silence, the classroom where I came first and nobody liked me anyway — and named it with such confidence that their kindness felt like blindness. They were saying something nice. They were trying to protect me. They didn’t understand that the shaman had seen through to the real thing.
I got out the only way it was possible to get out. Not through an external door. Not because someone finally said the right thing. Through my own handwriting, accumulated over months, until it outweighed the verdict. I wrote journals. I built the evidence myself — witness and investigator simultaneously — until the shape of what had happened became undeniable in my own testimony.
This series is that case file. Written from inside. The only direction the truth could travel.
There is something that sits underneath all of this. Something that explains — not excuses — how I got here.
My mum stopped speaking to me for months after I came out. We lived in the same apartment. She moved through the same rooms and pretended I didn’t exist. My father told me I was possessed by Satan for being queer.
My mother is a territorial feral cat. Capable of warmth, until something triggers the territory instinct — then she attacks with whatever stored information she has been holding. The silence after I came out was one long crouch. You never knew which version you were walking into.
Living with her after coming out meant reading the apartment the way you read a room with an animal you cannot fully trust. Not with fear exactly — with constant, exhausting vigilance.
I was so hungry for a mother figure after that.
A friend of mine — a therapist, though not mine — after I’d told her everything, months later, said: “Your mum really should have just hugged you when you came out. Because look what just happened.”
She was right.
What I didn’t know until later was that she had been watching me for years. Worried that someone would come along and use the specific shape of my vulnerability against me. She had a phrase for me in middle school — flower head over clouds — and she named the opening she could see in me to friends, privately, before any of this happened.
She saw it coming. I didn’t know she was watching.
Because in high school she told me I was using her as an emotional trash bin, and I took that lesson and quietly pulled back. The person watching most carefully for exactly this was the one I had decided not to burden. The shaman didn’t create that distance. A fight at sixteen did.
What just happened was: I called the shaman mum. I genuinely did. Because the shaman was warm and certain and told me she would never abandon me, and I was a person whose actual mother had gone silent in the next room, and I needed someone so badly that I didn’t look carefully enough at what I was accepting alongside the warmth.
I told my ex this. That I wanted to call the shaman mum. That I wanted her as a mother figure.
My ex relayed it — on the phone to the shaman, when I wasn’t present. She said she wants you to be her mum.
The shaman was shocked. And then, my ex told me later, she was moved.
I want to sit with that for a moment. The shaman — who had been systematically dismantling me, who had called me hollow and cleverly evil, who had been building the case for my removal — heard that I wanted her as a mother and felt something. Something that, whatever it was underneath, registered outwardly as being touched.
I don’t know what to do with that. I still don’t. It doesn’t exonerate what followed. But it means the shaman was not made entirely of strategy. Somewhere in there, receiving that from my ex, something human responded.
And somewhere in there, I was handing her the most undefended thing I had.
What I Believed vs What She Saw
The nun knew none of this when she spoke to me. She saw only what I presented: a person who had arrived at a temple the day after her breakup, on what turned out to be their third anniversary, still defending the verdict against herself five months later.
What I believed: I was the problem. Two people had tried everything, and I had failed them, and the breakup was the natural consequence of my inability to become what I needed to become.
What she saw: I’d been sent here the day before the breakup as a holding place while they executed a plan to end the relationship.
I remember the conversation where they decided to send me. I was there — sitting right there — and they discussed it as if I were a piece of furniture that needed to be moved before the renovation could begin. My ex asked the shaman, “Will she be fixed after a month? Three months? Six months?”
The shaman shook her head. No.
I sat there with tears running down my face, nodding. I didn’t know where the next correction or scolding would come from if I opened my mouth. So I kept quiet and let them decide.
And then, on the drive to the ceremony the following night, my ex told the shaman: “I feel like she’s been preparing herself for a breakup.”
I wasn’t. I had no idea what was coming. But I was sitting right there when she said it.
The shaman replied, “Well, this isn’t her first breakup, like it is for you. It’ll be easier for her.”
Said about me. In front of me. As if I weren’t present.
The temple wasn’t my idea. The temple was a sentence.
Why I Told No One
The day after the breakup, a friend contacted me.
She asked if I was alright. And I tried to answer her.
What came out of my mouth was not my voice. It was the shaman’s voice. The verdict that had been built over seventeen months and delivered at 3 am on a mountain and absorbed so completely that I couldn’t locate where it ended, and I began.
I told her: I ruined everything. I owed her so much. She tried to help me, but I was just too broken to be fixed. My parents are frauds. I am selfish.
I said these things. They came from my mouth. But I was not the one saying them.
I left out the shamanic rituals entirely — I didn’t want to say something that would sound absurd, that would tarnish the version of my ex I was still somehow protecting. So the story I told had the verdict without the mechanism. The conclusion without the evidence. Of course, it didn’t hold together.
The friend told me I was rambling. She said my story didn’t match. She was right that it didn’t match. She was wrong about why.
She messaged my ex directly. She told her she was sorry she hadn’t been on her side.
My ex called me.
“See? Other people see it too. They can see that you used me.”
Then: “I think you shouldn’t tell anyone what happened. It doesn’t put you in a good position.”
And I — already isolated by seventeen months of systematic separation from my friends, already convinced that my version of events was the unreliable one — I listened. I didn’t call anyone. I didn’t tell the story again.
The dead grandmother, at the ceremony, had said I was like a person pulled from drowning who then tried to steal the belongings of the one who saved her. That image was designed to make any attempt at self-defence look like theft. If I were the drowning person who had been saved, then asking for fairness would be ingratitude. Was greed. Was proof of exactly what they said I was.
Those questions are still forming. Because my ex did nurse me when I was sick. The care was real. The 3 am was also real. I am not yet able to hold both in the same sentence without one of them collapsing the other. That is the honest position.
The silence wasn’t weakness. It was the last thing the structure did before it let me go. It made sure I would be alone with it long enough for the brainwashing to feel like my own thoughts.
The case file disagreed.
Filed from the mountain,
Emotionally yours,
Suinny
P.S. If you’ve ever tried to tell your story and the words that came out belonged to someone else — that’s not you failing to explain. That’s what it looks like when someone else’s verdict has been living in your mouth.
Next week: The double bind. What happens when accepting a verdict and rejecting it are both evidence of the same crime.