What Remains Within: The Story of This Book and the Wound That Started It

I began writing this book not with an idea, but with a pain.

That’s why the story of What Remains Within doesn’t begin with a cup of coffee placed on the table, but with that familiar ache lodged right in the middle of the ribcage.

It was night.

The time didn’t really matter; after a certain hour, we no longer look at the clock but at our loneliness to know what time it is.

Everyone in the house had gone quiet, but the crowd inside me would not.

And at that point, the words that had been wandering inside me for years turned into a single sentence:

“Let it no longer stay inside me.”

I didn’t say that sentence out loud.

I just picked up the pen.

And to be honest: I did not start writing like a “writer”, but like someone defeated.

The wound this book was born from: The fractures you can’t name

What we call an “emotional breakdown” is often not a single event.

Someone leaves, someone goes silent, someone betrays you, someone is late…

But the real break happens in the place where you can’t talk about any of this.

That’s how it was for me too.

The wound of this book was not born from a grand, dramatic tragedy worthy of a cinema screen.

It came from a much quieter place.

From an apology I never managed to say in time, from a promise I couldn’t keep, from a few scenes where I couldn’t defend myself, and most of all from the moments when I abandoned myself.

Sometimes you don’t lose another person; you lose yourself.

Looking back, you see that what “remained within” was not what I couldn’t say to others, but what I never managed to say to myself.

This book is not a literary project; it is a belated confession I wrote from the place where I tried to bury myself.

I was already on the road before I ever set out...

I realised later: this book did not begin on the night I sat down to write.

It was part of an inner journey that had started long before.

Before a person is forced to “face their inner world”, they spend a long time trying to run away.

I did the same.

I hid in work, in busyness, in mental games, in the sentence “Never mind, it will pass.”

It didn’t pass.

I understood much later that what doesn’t pass is not the pain itself, but the pain that can’t be spoken.

What Remains Within was born exactly at that point:

On an evening when I stopped running, sat down on the chair and said, “Today I’m not going to hide from myself.”

That day I was at least this honest with myself:

“This is not going to be a self-help text.

This is not a success story of a neatly sorted life.

This is going to be an open file of an inner world that has not been put back together.”

That’s why, for me, What Remains Within is not a “guide for the reader”; it is more like my personal file left on a table, half read, with tear stains on the margins.

Writing was the first hearing in the case I brought against myself...

Inside me there was an invisible courtroom; I was the prosecutor, the defendant and the judge.

I was the one asking, “Why did you stay silent?” and the one whispering, “I was afraid.”

I was the one demanding, “Years have passed, are you still there?” and the one who couldn’t say, “Yes, I’m still here.”

At some point I realised this inner trial would never reach an official verdict. Because when you are trying to both condemn and forgive yourself, the file never closes.

So I tried something else: I turned the case file into literature.

I said, “Let What Remains Within become a book.”

Let the sentences I carry inside me be not only evidence, but also testimony.

That’s why these texts are not “healing promises in the form of advice”; they are more like lines that say:

“Look, I was there too. You are not alone; even your shame has a sibling.”

The first sentence: The scratch that broke the ice of silence.

The first sentence: The scratch that broke the ice of silence.

I will not repeat here the first sentence I wrote that night.

Because it is still inside me and I want it to remain a small secret between me and the reader.

But I can tell you this: my hand did not tremble as I wrote it.

What trembled was the silence that began where the sentence ended.

There was ink on the paper; inside me there was a mourning that had been covered over for years.

What I wrote was not some great literary discovery, but for me it meant this:

I was no longer as heavy as my silence.

I no longer had to swallow my words.

Remembering no longer had to mean only hurting.

Perhaps for an outside eye it was an ordinary opening line.

But in my ribcage, every letter that left the tip of the pen became the trace of a farewell, a belated confrontation, the courage to finally touch myself.

Facing the inner world: Looking at the crack, not the mirror...

The phrase “facing your inner world” sounds romantic.

In practice, it is not that aesthetic.

While I was facing myself, I did not write elegant sentences, I did not feel like an enlightened sage.

Most of the time I judged myself, asking, “Is this all the strength you have?”

Facing myself was not looking in the mirror; it was accepting the crack I didn’t even want to see in the mirror.

When I signed my name under What Remains Within, I had to pass through a place that sounded like this:

“Someone who reads these lines will think I am weak.

They will find me too emotional.

They will say, ‘This is too much drama.’”

Then I understood that I had already spent a part of my life denying myself just to “look strong.”

If I’m going to hold a book back just to protect the image I have in other people’s eyes, why write at all?

At that point, something deeper than “authorship” began: the thing we call inner journey.

The key on that journey was this:

I didn’t try to explain myself, I didn’t try to prove I was right; I simply chose to say, “This is where it hurt.”

And sometimes the sentence that changes a whole life is exactly this short.

I wrote this work for that former self who “remained within”.

There was a single person in my mind: an earlier “me”.

The me who realised some things too late, apologised too late, left too late, arrived too late.

As What Remains Within turned into a book, it was actually doing this for me:

“Look, I hear you.

No matter how foolish, weak or overdramatic I find you, you too have a story.

And I no longer want to hide that story from you.”

Later I realised that this “former me” was actually sitting in the same room with many people I have never met.

People who could not express themselves, who were afraid of being misunderstood, who were stuck in the role of the one who “keeps things going”, who tried to look strong while slowly collapsing inside…

When I finished the book, I felt this:

“I wrote these lines to someone, but I don’t know who.

Maybe it’s you.

Maybe it’s someone I will never meet.”

For me, What Remains Within is not a destination.

It is more like a letter that arrived late.

In this letter I did not justify myself, I did not blame anyone, I did not claim to have figured life out. Through days, years, relationships, silences and losses, I simply wanted to see, just once, what had accumulated inside me now standing outside of me on the page.

Because if a person wants to “face their inner world”, they must first become transparent with themselves.

Sometimes we do this in therapy, sometimes in a conversation with a friend, sometimes in a prayer to God, and sometimes in the pages of a book.

This time my path happened to be a book.

Perhaps this work is an apology that remained unsaid; a “don’t go” you never voiced; a “you hurt me” you never honestly admitted to yourself; that inner journey you have postponed for years.

The first spark of this book was a small confession that started inside me:

“I am someone who arrived late to myself.”

If you too are carrying somewhere inside you a sentence, a feeling, a “what if” you have never let out, know that these pages are not only mine.

The real question of this book is this:

What remains within you?

And when will you dare to say to yourself, “Let it no longer stay inside me”?