Do you like snails?
Most people feel disgusted when they see them, “slimy little things,” they say. But I admire them. They carry their homes, their burdens, on their backs and move slowly, carefully… still trying to live. They’re timid and fragile. With every tiny step, they leave behind a trail as if to say, “I’m here.”
They are silent creatures, and the only way their existence is acknowledged is through the crackling sound when someone accidentally — or sometimes cruelly — steps on them.
They’re so fragile…
Sometimes, I feel like a snail too. Slow. Timid. Fragile. Longing to scream.
The weight on my back, just like the soft, translucent shell a baby snail is born with has been there since I was born. I cried a lot as a baby, for reasons no one understood. They would quickly put a bottle in my mouth to silence me. But the milk, the formula, it upset me. No one noticed.
As I grew, I developed anxiety. But again, no one noticed. I carried fear within me, the kind of fear that a child shouldn’t have to know: the fear of death. I tried to swallow it. All of it.
Until now.
I wanted to be loud.
I wanted to run, to yell, to express.
But instead, I became the quiet, obedient girl. I was the “good one.” The one whose presence was barely felt. The one who silenced herself and carried everything on her back. Just like a snail’s shell hardens over time, so did the weight of everything I never said. Even before I got sick, the burden was getting heavier. Especially the anger I could never release, it started to eat me alive.
Then my body started to burn with unexplained fevers. I ended up in the hospital. And everything I had buried inside… resurfaced.
I was so scared.
I withdrew into my shell just like a snail freezing in the face of threat.
I was exposed.
Naked.
With all my silence, all my swallowed screams, all my trauma. Frightened, hardened, yet still fragile. And then… Something shifted.
I had no choice but to slow down. I became quiet. Something inside me was exploding, but I couldn’t speak it. My body began trembling more. It refused to walk. It stopped letting me talk. As if it was conserving energy to keep me safe, to survive. I froze. Completely.
Clung to life with no expression, sticking myself to the safest place I knew: home.
But lately… I’ve started to scream.
As if I’m trying to spit out years of silence. The weight on my back has grown too much.
I want to yell.
I do yell.
I break things.
I want to break out of my shell.
I want to move.
I want to shake my body.
I want to exist.
For all these years, I couldn’t say “I’m here.” But now, with this heavy shell on my back, I say it:
I’m here.
And I’m ready to move.
🐌
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