The Silent Archive of Suppressed Emotions: What Did I Dare to Speak About in This Book?

While writing What Remains Within, I realised one thing above all:

There were far more files inside me than I had imagined.

Some of them I already knew; they were the folders I had walked past for years saying, “I’ll look at them later.”

Others were like old photographs that only appear when light touches them, feelings whose names I had even forgotten.

That was when I understood that what we call “suppressed emotions” hides not only painful memories, but even the joys we are ashamed to talk about.

Because sometimes you feel as if you don’t even have the right to be happy.

So in What Remains Within, I tried to open that archive that had been waiting silently inside me for years—both my pain and my hidden joys—at least a little.

Suppressed emotions: The “I’ll look at it later” pile inside me...

For years I had made a deal with my emotions that went like this:

“Not now.

It’s not the time.

We’ll look at it later.”

When I was hurt, I stayed silent.

When I was missed, I didn’t show it.

When I missed someone, I kept myself busy.

When I was afraid, I tried to act “rationally.”

From the outside, this looks like being “in control.”

From the inside, though, it has another name: emotional repression.

Emotional repression most often comes not from others, but from ourselves.

“Don’t exaggerate so much.”

“Don’t be so sensitive.”

“If you make a big deal out of this, you’ll look weak.”

My inner voice kept pouring concrete over my emotions like this.

Then one day I realised that what lay beneath that concrete was still trying to breathe.

That day, I returned to the writing desk.

The feelings I was able to voice for the first time in What Remains Within...

While writing What Remains Within, I asked myself this question:

“What will I dare to say here for the very first time?”

For the first time, I left my disappointment with myself this exposed.

It was as if I had always been hurt by others; that’s how I had told it for years.

Yet the deepest hurt I had lived was when I left myself halfway.

For the first time, I accepted this in such a naked way.

For the first time, I wrote that some of my “if only”s were in fact small deaths whose mourning I had never really gone through.

A decision, a renunciation, something I failed to do…

I had never held a funeral for them.

I had brushed them off saying, “That’s life, these things happen.”

Yet there was still a part of me dressed in black inside.

For the first time, I admitted the exhaustion of always casting myself in the strong role.

For the first time, I had such a long conversation with the tired child hiding behind the sentences “I’m resilient, I’ll pull myself together, I’ll manage.”

That child asked this of me: “At least be honest in this book.”

That’s how suppressed emotions seeped into the text.

Not because I planned it, but because I had reached the point of “I can’t hide this anymore.”

Facing emotions: Late surgeries performed at the writing desk...

Facing emotions may sound like a romantic inner journey.

In my experience, it was nothing like that.

It was more like a surgery done without anaesthesia.

While writing some paragraphs, my throat tightened.

In some lines my hands stopped, my eyes escaped into the spaces between the sentences.

Some sentences I wrote and deleted, then got angry with myself and wrote them again.

Facing emotions does not end with saying, “This is how I feel.”

The real question comes from here:

“Why am I so ashamed of this feeling?”

I realised that I had feelings I was ashamed of.

Jealousy, fragility, worthlessness, feeling lonely…

We sometimes blame ourselves not only for being in pain, but also for feeling this way.

In this book, I tried to turn down the volume of that inner prosecutor and turn up the voice of the witness a little.

“Yes, this is how I felt.

Yes, maybe I exaggerated.

Yes, maybe I misread it.

But still, I felt it.

This is my truth too.”

The moment I accepted this sentence, suppressed emotions slowly started to come out of the file.

Emotional healing was not a goal, but a side effect...

I did not write What Remains Within with the goal of “emotional healing.”

If I had sat down at the desk saying “I must heal,” I would probably have locked up even more.

I wrote this book saying, “Whatever happens, at least let me stop lying to myself.”

If healing happened, it was at most a side effect.

Emotional healing sometimes comes not with great enlightenments, but with very small moments of acceptance.

Each time you can say, “Yes, this too is part of me,” a thin lock inside opens.

In the pages of this book, I heard these sentences directed at myself this clearly for the first time:

“You’re not broken just because you feel so much.”

“The fact that you’re hurt doesn’t mean you’re wrong.”

“Say not what you’re supposed to feel, but what you actually feel.”

From the outside, these may look like ordinary sentences.

In the silent archive inside me, though, they were each a revolution.

This book is the diary kept by suppressed emotions...

Looking back, What Remains Within represents this for me:

A diary in which suppressed emotions finally speak in their own handwriting.

In this diary there are not aphorisms, but open wounds.

Not lessons, but confessions.

There are no answers to “How does one become a better person?”;

there is a heart that tries to honestly ask, “How was I really?”

Emotional repression silences a person.

In this book, I tried to crack my own silence, even if just a little.

Maybe not by shouting, but at least by entrusting the whisper to paper.

If one day you give the name “suppressed emotions” to that familiar weight wandering inside you, know that you are not alone.

We are all carrying small archives inside us that nobody sees.

Some folders say “I’ll look at it later” on them; some are not even labelled.

While writing this book, I opened the lid of my own archive just a little.

None of what I kept inside vanished miraculously.

But now they have names.

They are no longer hiding; I simply know where they are.

Maybe this is the first step for you too.

First, to give that feeling a name.

Then to ask yourself the question you have postponed for years:

“What did I really feel, and why did I hide it from myself?”