Not always the words themselves. I miss those sometimes. But the shapes. The types. The recurring species of well-meaning speech that arrive reliably whenever someone finds out you can’t hear.

What follows is a field guide. For identification purposes only.

THE WILDCARD

“I had a deaf cat once.”

We are starting at the far end of the field, because I need you to understand the range of what arrives. “We had a deaf dog growing up, actually.”

This category exists. I want you to sit with that.

Someone learns that I, a grown adult, have lost my hearing, and the nearest file their brain reaches for is a pet. The animal always differed from me in several fundamental ways, including being an animal, but I understand there is a reaching happening, and I receive it as such.

I think about these animals sometimes. I hope they did well.

THE WELL-INTENTIONED CLASSIC

“You don’t even seem deaf.”

The most common sighting in the field.

So common that I’ve already filed the full dossier elsewhere, decoded it line by line, and retired from explaining it. If you read “Seventy Percent,” you have it.

What I’ll add here, for identification purposes, is the tell: the warmth. It always arrives smiling. Nobody has ever handed me that sentence and braced for impact. They offer it like a gift, and then they wait, visibly, for the thank-you.

I’ve stopped supplying it. The silence where the thank-you used to go is, I’ve found, extremely educational for everyone present.

Read more

MESSY REINVENTION PRESENTS

The Things Disability Taught Me

Four essays about disability, identity, and rebuilding.

Author’s note: This essay describes a period years ago when I wasn’t sure I wanted to stay. I’m telling it from the other side, and I’m genuinely well now..

There’s a version of this story where I lose my hearing, have a good cry, learn a Valuable Lesson, and emerge wiser and softer and ready for my close-up. I have told that version. It’s easier on everyone, including me.

It’s also a lie, and I think you deserve the true one.

The true one starts on a balcony.

You have to understand who I was first. I was a music kid. Not casually. Musical theater since before I can remember, a scholarship to study it, years spent singing for a living. Sound wasn’t a hobby I had. It was the load-bearing wall of the entire building.

It was how I knew who I was.

And then the flu, and the genetic switch nobody knew about, and six months. That’s all it took. Half a year to go from a life built entirely out of sound to a silence so complete I could hear my own pulse and nothing else.

I stood on the balcony of my apartment one night in that silence. No traffic below. No birds. Nothing. And I looked out at a world that had gone quiet and I genuinely, seriously wondered whether it still had a place in it for a version of me that couldn’t hear. Whether the building could stand at all with the load-bearing wall gone.

I’m not going to dress that moment up.

It was as dark as it sounds.

Here’s what I need you to know about what came after, because this is where the inspirational version lies the hardest.

Nobody cued the music. Chariots of Fire did not start playing while I ran in slow motion toward acceptance. There was no montage. There was no single morning I woke up healed.

I crawled.

I dragged myself through it one genuinely terrible day at a time.

I got help, the real kind, the kind you have to keep showing up for. I gave it time, which is the least glamorous medicine there is. I learned an entire new language with my hands.

And slowly, without ceremony, I found a whole Deaf world I hadn’t known was waiting, full of people who’d never once needed me to perform being fine.

The wall got rebuilt. Not the same wall. A different one, in a different place, out of different material. But it holds.

The building’s still standing. I’m still in it.

I’m telling you the balcony part on purpose. Because a survival story that skips the part where you almost didn’t isn’t a survival story. It’s a brochure. And I’ve never been interested in being anyone’s brochure.

I came back different.

That’s the honest ending.

Not better, not wiser, not a lesson.

Just different, and here, and still building.

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The Things Disability Taught Me Series:
✓ Seventy Percent
✓ The Floor, Not the Favor
✓ The Balcony
○ Through, Not Despite

Paid subscribers also get the companion series:

✓ A Complete Guide to Helping a Deaf Person
✓ I Am Not Dead
○ Things Hearing People Say
○ I Said Yes

Read My Lips (Acoustic Version) is live, and if you want to skip everything I’m about to say and just go feel it, I won’t be offended. That’s what it’s for.

Listen: Read My Lips (Acoustic Version)

But if you stay, I’m going to tell you why this one scared me more than anything I’ve released.

Here’s what nobody tells you about stripping a song down.

Everyone thinks acoustic means gentle. Softer. Safer. A candlelit version of the real thing. And sometimes it is.

This wasn’t that.

There’s another version of this song already out there... the full-production one on my album. That version is a banger, full stop. Windows down, volume up, scream-it-in-the-car defiance. I love it and I stand behind every second of it.

This one just says the same truth a different way. That version shouts it to a room. This one says it straight to your face, with nothing else in the room at all.

Taking the production off this song didn’t make it softer. It took away every single thing I could hide behind. No beat to carry me. No layers to fill the space. No wall of sound to stand behind while I said something true. Just a guitar, a little piano, and the one instrument I have the least control over.

My own voice.

I need you to understand what that means for me specifically, because it’s the whole reason this was terrifying.

I went deaf at thirty-five. I don’t hear my voice the way you hear yours. When I sing, I’m not listening... I’m feeling. I track the vibration in my chest, the buzz in my throat, the hum in the bones of my face. I trust muscle memory and sensation and years of doing this in a body that stopped hearing itself a long time ago.

My voice is the part of me I can’t fully hear and can’t fully control. It’s the most exposed thing I own.

And this arrangement took everything else away and put THAT out front. Raw. Uncovered. The one thing I can’t monitor the way you can, standing alone in the middle of the song with nothing around it.

That is a special kind of terror. Building the most naked version of a song around the exact part of yourself that deafness made ungovernable. Trusting the thing you can’t hear to carry the whole weight.

I almost didn’t do it

And then I did it anyway. And something happened I wasn’t expecting.

This version came out almost fully formed. Fast. Like it had been sitting inside the song the entire time, waiting for me to be ready to find it. Or waiting for me to be ready to say it.

Because here’s what I finally understood: the terror WAS the point. The nakedness was the point. I couldn’t say this song’s truth from behind a wall of production. I had to say it with my full chest. Just me. Just my voice. Just who I am, laid all the way bare.

The rage. The joy. The defiance. The years of being told to shrink. All of it, with nothing to hide behind.

And the second I stopped hiding, it became the truest version of the song I’ve ever made.

Read My Lips is my song about being deaf. That’s where it comes from. The hearing world has spent years asking me to read ITS lips... to do the work, keep up, make everyone else comfortable while I quietly translate the whole room. This song is me flipping that. No. Read mine now.

But I didn’t write it so only I could sing it.

If you’ve ever been told to tone it down. To be smaller. To be less. If you’ve ever been made to feel broken or wrong or too much or not enough. If you’ve ever performed being fine so the room stayed comfortable while you carried the cost...

then this song is yours too.

You don’t have to be deaf to know what it feels like to be told to shrink. You just have to have refused.

So when that hook hits... read my lips, I’m doing just fine... I don’t want you to just hear me sing it.

I want you to sing it with me.

Full chest. Nothing to hide behind.

Just who you are, laid all the way bare, and doing just fine anyway.

It’s out now. This is the one that scared me. It’s also the truest thing I’ve ever made.

Go find out why.

💌 This is the first drop from my new music newsletter: new releases, behind-the-scenes, and everything in between. If someone forwarded you here, you can subscribe below so you don’t miss the next one.

SUBSCRIBE: Waymon Hudson Music

I have announced my own death by text more times than I can count. I have sent updates on my progress as a recently deceased person. I have texted friends. I have texted colleagues. I have texted my mother. The phone always wins. The phone always picks dead.

I now proofread every single outgoing message like I am reviewing a legal document because somewhere between my thumbs and the send button, my phone is filing paperwork I did not authorize.

I want to be clear that I wrote the word “deaf” three times in the paragraph above and had to correct it twice.

This would be funny if it were the only way technology was specifically failing me.

It is nowhere near the only way.

The Deaf community has a name for auto-captions.

We call them craptions.

This is not a word I invented. It is a category. An established taxonomy. A genre. You can identify craptions immediately because they have the specific quality of a message that passed through several games of telephone and came out the other side fluent in a language that is almost English.

“Nice to meet you” becomes “ice to feet shoe.”

“I appreciate your patience” becomes “I’ll precipitation your patients.”

Read more

That we are dangerous. That we are confused, or predatory, or broken, or evil, and that whatever we are, it can be fixed. They are saying it about trans people loudest of all this year: stripping away their healthcare, writing them out of the law one state at a time, deciding in legislatures full of men who have never met them that who they are is a disease with a cure. But if you are queer in any letter of that acronym, they are talking about you too. They always have been. The specific target rotates. The argument never changes.

Here is the thing they are counting on: that you don’t know they’ve made this argument before.

They have. And I wrote a story about where it led.

It’s called The Ward That Breathed Back, and it starts publishing this week. It’s horror. It’s also the truest thing I’ve ever written, and I need to tell you why I couldn’t not write it.

Read Part One here.

Let me tell you what actually happened, because most people don’t know, and that’s not an accident.

In the 1940s (and the fifties, and the sixties, well within living memory, within your grandparents’ lifetimes) queer people in America were entrapped by police, committed to psychiatric hospitals, and treated. Not metaphorically. Medically. There were wards for this. There were doctors who specialized in it.

The treatments were these: electroconvulsive therapy, administered while the patient was awake, no anesthesia, violent enough to break bones. Aversion therapy, where they injected you with a drug that made you violently sick and then showed you images of people you might love, over and over, until your body learned to associate desire with agony. And for the ones who didn’t “improve,” who didn’t get “better,” the lobotomy. An icepick through the eye socket, fifteen minutes, and whoever you were before was simply gone.

You did not check yourself out. There was no release date. You left when a doctor decided you were cured, and most people were never cured, because you cannot cure a person of themselves. You can only take pieces of them until there isn’t enough left to object.

They did this in the name of medicine. And they did it, very often, in the name of God.

That’s the part I need you to sit with. Because the machine that did this wasn’t just doctors. It was doctors and priests and judges and fathers, all pointed in the same direction, all certain they were helping. The cruelty wore the face of care. That is not a flourish I added for the horror. That is the historical record. They called it mercy. They meant erasure. And they were proud of it… they took photographs.

I write a horror series called Silent Horrors. People come to it for the dread, for the thing beneath the floor, the slow wrongness, the sense that something is not right in a room that looks ordinary. But the longer I write it, the clearer the real horror becomes, and it was never a monster. It’s a system. It’s what people do to each other and call righteousness. It’s history. It happened. The Ward That Breathed Back is the story where I stopped hiding that behind metaphor and simply told the truth.

The story follows one man. A teacher named Alan, who loved words and loved a man named Billy, and who was walking home one night when a plainclothes officer decided a nod and a smile were a crime. Alan takes the hospital instead of a public record, because a record would end his career, and he’s a teacher, and he can’t lose the kids. A few weeks, they tell him. He’ll be back before anyone notices.

He never comes back.

I want you to notice something about Alan, because I built him this way on purpose. He is a gay teacher, destroyed in 1947 for the crime of being who he is near children. And right now, in Florida and everywhere Florida’s laws have metastasized, gay teachers are being forced back into the closet under threat of losing everything… told that their existence near a classroom is a danger, that a photo of their spouse on their desk is grooming, that they must vanish or be vanished. Seventy-nine years apart. The same wound. The same argument. The same machine, aimed at the same people, insisting the whole time that it’s protecting the children from us.

They want you to think this is history. It is a warning.

I did not write this from research alone. I wrote it because I have sat in the room.

I was twelve years old when my family decided what I needed was a weekend of men. They sent me to a Christian men’s revival… thousands of them, in a stadium, no women allowed, gathered for the specific purpose of promising God they’d be better. I was twelve. I barely had knees. But there I was, cataloguing the fog machine and the overlit stage to survive, because judging their production values was the only power I had while several thousand grown men told us that people like me would die alone, get sick, be abandoned, and deserve it.

And then the beautiful one took the stage.

He was different from the sweaty men in their ill-fitting suits. He was handsome in the specific way of a man who has decided God made moisturizer on purpose. Perfect hair. Altered suit. He took the microphone and told us, with earnest and gorgeous conviction, that he had once suffered under the demon of homosexuality. That he’d risen above it. That we could too.

He was, of course, the gayest man in the building.

And he was the most dangerous one there, because the sweaty men I could dismiss, but he was beautiful and certain and he made it land somewhere in me the others couldn’t reach. The poison is always sweeter in the prettiest mouth. He had found the one closet the world would never think to open, the pulpit, and he was buying his own safety with the shame of every queer boy in that stadium. Building his shield out of our bodies. Sacrificing us to save himself, and calling it ministry.

When I wrote a closeted priest into The Ward That Breathed Back, a man who prays over the men his hiding helps destroy, who blesses them with the very hands he has hidden… I did not invent him.

I met him when I was twelve. I have been writing toward him ever since.

I don’t extend a lot of grace to the institution that built that stadium, and I won’t pretend to here.

The Church, and I mean organized religion in its accumulated historical weight, has never held the moral high ground it claims. This is the institution of the Crusades and the Inquisition, of the residential schools, of the abuse it spent decades hiding and moving from parish to parish. It has always been very good at exactly one thing: hoarding power and money while the people it claims to serve pay the price. The cruelty in my story is not a distortion of that history. It is a faithful portrait of it. An institution that could look at a frightened queer child and see a demon to be cast out is an institution operating exactly as designed.

I was raised in a church that wanted to damn me. I know what it sounds like when someone destroys you and calls it love. And I am watching that same church climb back into our laws and our lives right now… not as a relic, but as a movement, with lawyers and legislators and a very clear list of who to fix first.

Those who don’t know their history are doomed to repeat it. We are repeating it. Right now.

I survived the thing that was built to correct me. A lot of us did. A lot of us didn’t.

And here is what I’ve come to understand about survival, the thing that made me have to write this story: the people who came before us were not just victims. Some of them were keepers. They hid their letters and their photographs and their true names. They memorized each other. They wrote it down when writing it down was dangerous, and they carried it out of those wards and those stadiums and those living-room interventions folded flat against their chests, because someone had to, because if we forget it they win twice.

I am not a victim of that stadium anymore. I got out. And now I get to be the other thing. I get to be the one who keeps the record. That is what this story is. It is me, refusing to let it be forgotten. It is me handing you the folded pages and saying: here, this happened, don’t you dare look away.

So this is what I’m asking.

Read the story. Not because it’s mine, but because it’s ours… because it’s the history they are working very hard to keep you from knowing, told in the one form that might make you feel it in your body instead of just filing it away. Read it, and then send it to someone who needs to understand why we are so afraid right now, and why that fear is not hysteria but memory.

The Ward That Breathed Back begins this week. Three parts. Free to everyone, because some stories aren’t for gatekeeping. Start with Part One.

They are counting on us to forget.

Let’s refuse.

Read "The Ward That Breathed Back" Now

MESSY REINVENTION PRESENTS

The Things Disability Taught Me

Four essays about disability, identity, and rebuilding.

Let me tell you about the accessible entrance.

I asked a venue, once, if there was seating up front where I could see the performers’ faces. That’s it. That’s the whole ask. I lipread, and I read expression, and from the back of a theater a performer’s face is a rumor. I didn’t need a ramp. I didn’t need anyone to physically help me.

I can walk.

I could have strolled through the front doors, down the aisle, and parked myself in a good seat like anybody else.

Instead, someone walked me around the side of the building. Down an alley. Past the dumpster. To an “accessible entrance” tucked behind the venue like a secret they’d rather keep.

I’m deaf.

I want to be clear about the physical comedy here.

They routed me through the trash to accommodate a disability that has nothing to do with my legs, when the accommodation I actually needed was a chair with a decent sightline.

I have never felt more thoroughly helped and less actually assisted in my life.

I stood by the trash cans and felt, not for the first time, like someone had solved a problem they hadn’t bothered to understand.

That’s the thing nobody tells you about “accessibility.” Most of the time, it isn’t access. It’s the appearance of access, installed where it won’t inconvenience the front of the house.

Exhibit B: the movie theater.

You know the device. The archaic little contraption that clips into your cup holder, bends up in front of your face on a gooseneck, and displays the film’s captions. In theory. In practice I have now lived the entire product lifecycle.

The first one they handed me was dead, not charged. The second one, also dead. The third connected to absolutely nothing. The fourth actually connected, small miracle, and then refused to balance in the cup holder, so I held it like a votive candle through the trailers.

Its battery died thirty minutes into the movie.

Four devices. One matinee. Zero captions.

And I want you to notice what that whole system communicates, because the message is the point. It says: we technically comply. It says: your access is a peripheral, an afterthought, a gadget we keep in a drawer and don’t maintain, rather than something built into the room. Hearing people get the movie. I get a scavenger hunt for a dying flashlight that occasionally, if I’m lucky, tells me what’s being said.

None of this is generosity.

That’s the reframe I want you to sit with.

When you turn on captions, when you face me while you talk, when a venue builds a real seat into a real room, you are not doing me a favor. You are correcting for a space that was designed, from the studs up, without me in it.

The default was never neutral. It just felt neutral to you, because you were the one it was built for.

I’ve stopped performing gratitude for the bare minimum.

You want a thank-you? Maintain the caption device. Build the good seat into the actual theater. Stop hiding the help by the dumpster.

That’s not a high bar. It’s the floor. I’d just like to be able to find it without a flashlight.

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The Things Disability Taught Me Series:
✓ Seventy Percent
✓ The Floor, Not the Favor
○ The Balcony
○ Through, Not Despite

Paid subscribers also get the companion series: four pieces, funnier and a little… meaner.

✓ A Complete Guide to Helping a Deaf Person
○ I Am Not Dead
○ Things Hearing People Say
○ I Said Yes

👁️ FROM SILENT HORRORS

The side door. The dying flashlight. The help you can only reach by walking past the dumpster. All of it runs on one belief: that this is kindness, and you should be grateful for it.

On July 14 I start publishing the story I built this entire Silent Horrors year around. It is called The Ward That Breathed Back. In 1947, a man is arrested walking home for loving another man, and offered a choice: a public record that ends his life, or a few weeks in a hospital that promises to fix him. He takes the hospital. Inside, they set out to correct him with electricity, with drugs that turn desire into nausea, and, if those fail, with an icepick through the eye. The people doing it are certain, all the way down, that they are helping.

None of the treatment in it is invented. It is documented history, and the men who ran those wards kept the receipts.

The Ward That Breathed Back begins July 14. Three parts. Free to everyone. Subscribe now, so Part One is waiting the moment it opens.

Subscribe to Silent Horrors Now

🎵 SOUNDTRACK OF REINVENTION

Read My Lips (Acoustic Version)

This whole essay is about being routed to the side door and told to be grateful for it. Being handed the smallest possible version of a room and asked to shrink to fit it.

I wrote a song that refuses to shrink:

“You want me silent, want me still… but baby, I was born to thrill.”

It’s out now

Stripped down to guitar, piano, and voice… same defiance, nothing to hide behind.

Find on all streaming platforms

The problem, specifically as it relates to me, is that the reaching is not always particularly well-aimed.

What follows is a partial record. I want to be clear that it is partial. I have been doing this for a while.

1. The Unaccompanied Minor

An airline gate agent once offered me the unaccompanied minor service.

I am going to let that sentence sit for a moment.

The unaccompanied minor service is a program that exists for children. Small humans, under a certain age, traveling without a parent or guardian. Children. Minors. Who are unaccompanied. This is what the name describes.

I am a full-grown adult man. I have a job. I pay taxes. I have a mortgage, opinions about wine, and a skincare routine. I have been navigating airports for the entirety of my adult life, including the years before I lost my hearing, and the basic process of finding a gate has not changed significantly.

The agent was completely sincere. She walked me through the benefits with the specific warmth of someone who had helped many nervous children onto planes and was genuinely delighted to do it again. I thanked her. I declined. I went and sat in the terminal and thought about it for longer than I’d like to admit.

The assumption underneath: deafness means I cannot navigate independently. That I am, functionally, a child who requires management through the system.

What would have actually helped: facing me when she spoke.

Read more

MESSY REINVENTION PRESENTS

The Things Disability Taught Me

Four essays about disability, identity, and rebuilding.

I catch about seventy percent of a conversation on a good day.

The other thirty I build myself, in real time, out of context and muscle memory and the specific shape your mouth makes when you land on a hard consonant. I am running a live translation service inside my own skull while also, somehow, appearing to laugh at the right moments. The migraine that shows up behind my left eye by four in the afternoon is the invoice for that service.

It always gets paid.

I went deaf at thirty-five. One ordinary flu tripped a genetic switch nobody knew I was carrying, and inside of six months the sound was just... gone. I did not get to grow up in the Deaf world, fluent and rooted. I arrived as an adult, mid-life, and had to learn on the job.

And the first job I taught myself, before ASL, before anything, was how to pass.

Passing is a performance so complete that the audience forgets there's a stage.

Here is what it actually looks like. I watch your lips. I track your eyebrows, because eyebrows tell me where a sentence is going before your mouth gets there. I clock the rhythm of the room so I know when the joke is landing and can laugh half a beat behind the people who actually heard it.

I have a whole silent decision tree running for the moment I miss something: is this worth asking you to repeat, or do I nod and gamble that you didn't just tell me your dog died?

Mostly I nod. I have gambled on the dog and lost.

We do not need to discuss it.

And here is the part that still gets me. When I do this well, when the performance is seamless, people congratulate me for it.

"You don't even seem deaf." Said warmly. Said like a gift.

What they're actually reviewing is the performance. They're telling me the labor worked so well they forgot it was labor. That I hid the effort so thoroughly they got to experience me as effortless. It is a five-star review of a show I never wanted to run, and I'm supposed to say thank you.

I used to say thank you.

I don't do that math anymore, the one where I tally up what it costs me and quietly eat the difference so the room stays comfortable.

The seventy percent is real.

The thirty percent I'm building by hand is real.

The migraine is extremely real.

It is not a personality trait. It is work.

Consider this the invoice

The Things Disability Taught Me
✓ Seventy Percent
○ The Floor, Not the Favor
○ The Balcony
○ Through, Not Despite

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Paid subscribers also get the companion series: four pieces, funnier and a little… meaner. First one drops Wednesday.
○ A Complete Guide to Helping a Deaf Person
○ I Am Not Dead
○ Things Hearing People Say
○ I Said Yes

👁️ FROM SILENT HORRORS

The Profile Was Already Open

As a darker counterpoint to this week’s essay, I published a new Silent Horrors story.

It’s about a man who becomes very good at making himself easy to choose.

Better photos.
Better profile.
Better version of himself.

Until he realizes something else has learned how to use that performance, too.

Like most Silent Horrors stories, it isn’t really about monsters.

It’s about the things we slowly become while trying to survive.

If you’ve ever mistaken performance for connection...

this one might stay with you.

Silent Horrors

The Profile Was Already Open

I deleted the app three times that month…

Read more

22 days ago · 5 likes · Waymon Hudson

🎵 SOUNDTRACK OF REINVENTION

Through My Skin

This month I’ll be sharing songs from my debut album, Through My Skin.

I lost my hearing at thirty-five.

These songs came afterward.

They’re about what the world feels like when sound gives way to vibration. Touch. Heat. Sweat. Breath. Longing. Bodies. Presence.

They’re the soundtrack to everything I’ve been writing this month.

If you’ve ever wondered what music sounds like after deafness...

this is where I’d start.

An apology. An explanation. A tearful confession. A dramatic speech where they finally realized the damage they caused and fell to their knees under the crushing weight of self-awareness.

You know.

A fantasy.

The problem with closure is that most of us aren’t actually waiting for closure. We’re waiting for a rewrite.

We’re waiting for the ex to suddenly become emotionally available. We’re waiting for the friend who betrayed us to develop a conscience. We’re waiting for the parent who hurt us to wake up one morning and think:

“My God. I have been the problem this entire time.”

Which, if you’ve met people, you know is not always how this works.

In fact, one of the most frustrating lessons of adulthood is discovering that some people never become who you hoped they would be.

Not because they can’t. Because they don’t.

And while they’re busy remaining exactly who they’ve always been, you’re sitting there holding your breath waiting for the ending to change.

Fuck that.

I think closure has one of the best PR teams in human history.

People talk about it like it’s the final stage of healing. Like you can’t move forward until somebody hands you an official certificate declaring:

Congratulations. You may now stop suffering.

But what if closure isn’t actually the thing you’re waiting for?

What if what you’re really waiting for is validation?

Proof that what happened was real. Proof that it mattered. Proof that you weren’t crazy. Proof that they knew what they were doing. Proof that they understand it now.

The problem is that some people will never give you that proof. Not because your pain wasn’t real. Because they don’t have the emotional equipment required to provide it.

You can spend twenty years waiting for accountability from someone who still thinks they’re the victim in a story they set on fire.

I know this because I did it.

For years, some part of me carried around a fantasy. Not consciously. I wasn’t sitting around writing revenge monologues in my journal. But somewhere deep down, I thought one day my father would realize what he had done.

I imagined him finally understanding. Finally seeing it. Finally feeling the weight of it.

I imagined an apology so sincere it would somehow make sense of everything that came before.

And if I’m being honest? I had a similar fantasy about my mother. That one day she would look at the wreckage, understand her role in it, and ask for forgiveness.

Not excuses. Not explanations. Not revisionist history.

The truth. The whole truth. The kind that finally lets a wound exhale.

It never happened. Not because I wasn’t patient enough. Not because I didn’t explain myself clearly enough. Not because I failed to find the right words.

It never happened because they never changed.

That’s the part nobody wants to tell you.

Sometimes the people who hurt you stay exactly who they are.

The grand revelation never arrives. The apology never comes. The movie ends without the scene you’ve been waiting for.

And for a long time, I thought that meant I couldn’t move on. Because how do you heal without closure?

Turns out, pretty well.

Healing doesn't require the people who hurt you to suddenly become better people.

The truth is that waiting for closure was hurting me more than the original wound.

Because every year I spent waiting was another year I handed them power they hadn’t earned. Every time I checked to see if they’d changed. Every time I wondered if maybe this would be the conversation. Every time I hoped.

I was still letting them sit in the center of a story that belonged to me.

Healing couldn’t start because I was still waiting for permission. Permission to be angry. Permission to grieve. Permission to stop hoping. Permission to let go. Permission to build a life that wasn’t organized around what happened.

The thing nobody tells you is that closure is often just permission you’re hoping somebody else will give you.

And this isn’t just about parents.

That’s the thing.

People get hung up on closure in a thousand different ways.

The ex who cheated, lied, disappeared, or never loved you the way they said they did. The friend who betrayed you and somehow turned themselves into the victim. The boss who never saw the work you did. The coworker who took credit for it. The family member who keeps pretending nothing happened. The person who shattered your trust and then walked away with the audacity of someone who thinks they’re the injured party.

Different story. Same trap.

You’re waiting for them to finally understand. Finally admit it. Finally acknowledge what happened. Finally become the person who can give you the ending you deserved.

And every once in a while, it happens.

Someone apologizes. Someone grows. Someone surprises you.

But most of the time?

You’re standing outside a locked door hoping the house has renovated itself.

It hasn’t.

And while you’re waiting for them to change, your life is parked in neutral.

That’s the hidden cost of needing closure.

Not that you never get it. That you stop living until you do. You're treating your future like it's being held in escrow by someone who already left.

But they don’t own it.

They never did.

Some people get apologies. Some people get accountability. Some people get beautiful conversations that tie everything together with a neat little emotional bow.

Good for them.

Truly.

I support their journey.

But I wouldn’t build my healing plan around a miracle.

Because sometimes the healthiest thing you can do is accept that the person you’ve been waiting on is not coming. Not the version you needed. Not the version you deserved. Not the version who finally understands.

They’re gone.

Or maybe they never existed in the first place.

And once you stop waiting for them to arrive, something strange happens.

You get your life back. Not because you got closure. Because you stopped needing it. Because you finally accepted that your healing was never supposed to be dependent on somebody else’s character development.

And honestly?

That realization did more for me than any apology ever could.

So if you’re sitting there refreshing an old wound, hoping someone finally becomes the person you’ve needed them to be for years...

Fuck that.

You don’t need closure.

You need to stop checking whether they’ve finally become the person you needed.

They haven’t.

And that’s okay.

You can leave anyway.

👁️ THIS WEEK’S SILENT HORRORS

As a strange counterpoint to this week’s essay, I published a new Silent Horrors story:

A Normal Life.

It’s about a woman who spends decades waiting.

Not for closure exactly. For return. For the impossible moment when the thing that took the woman she loved finally gives her back.

And that waiting slowly becomes its own kind of trap.

One of the things I kept thinking about while writing it was this: Sometimes the thing keeping us stuck isn’t what happened.

It’s our refusal to stop waiting for a different ending. For an apology. For a miracle. For someone, or something, to finally become what we needed.

Sometimes the door never opens. Sometimes the person never changes. Sometimes the life you wanted isn’t coming back.

And sometimes freedom begins the moment you stop standing there waiting for it.

https://open.substack.com/pub/silenthorrors/p/a-normal-life?r=19hwko&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true

🎵 SOUNDTRACK OF REINVENTION

This week’s essay kept reminding me of one song from my album Through My Skin:

Before I Go.

At its core, it’s a song about realizing someone isn’t going to become who you’ve been waiting for them to be. Not because they’re evil. Not because they don’t care.

Because they’re not changing.

And eventually you have to decide whether you’re going to keep waiting for a different version of them... or choose yourself.

One lyric hits especially hard alongside this essay:

“I didn’t want to go, I just wanted you to try.”

I think that’s the hidden heartbreak beneath a lot of closure.

Most of us aren’t looking for an ending. We’re looking for evidence that the ending didn’t have to happen. But sometimes the most loving thing you can do for yourself is stop waiting for the other person to become different.

And leave anyway.

And let’s be clear, that was no picnic.

Memory, especially the kind shaped by trauma, does not arrive politely.

It does not walk in with a folder and say, “Here is the timeline, here are the facts, here is the emotional arc, and here is a tasteful ending that will make readers feel enriched but not alarmed.”

Rude, honestly.

Mine arrived in flashes. A smell. A room. A sound. A breath. A sentence.

The feeling of knowing something was wrong before I had the language for what wrong was.

So yes, remembering was hard.

But it turned out the harder part was deciding how honest to be once I did. Not because I wanted to lie.

Because I have spent most of my life turning difficult things into easier stories. That’s what humor is for. That’s what charm is for.

That’s what survival is for.

A funny story gets invited to dinner. A painful one gets asked to leave.

And if you are a queer kid growing up in the Deep South, especially one who is too soft, too round, too theatrical, too sensitive, too much of everything nobody asked for, you learn very quickly that making people laugh can save you.

Sometimes literally.

The joke walks into the room first.

Then, if it feels safe, maybe the truth follows.

Maybe.

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That felt enormous then.

Impossible, sometimes.

To say it out loud. To make the private thing public. To take the part of myself I had been taught to hide, soften, explain, pray over, laugh away, and finally hold it up to the light.

I’m gay.

There. A sentence small enough to fit in a breath.

A sentence big enough to rearrange a life.

Back then, Pride felt like declaration.

A door opening. A name spoken. A hand held in public. A kiss not pulled away from too quickly. A dance floor where nobody was pretending not to look. A bar full of people who had spent all week surviving the world and somehow still found enough glitter, bass, sweat, and nerve to become beautiful under bad lighting.

It felt like proof.

We are here. We are still here. We are not asking.

And I still believe in that version of Pride.

I will always believe in it.

There is something sacred about visibility when you grew up invisible. Something holy about being seen after years of learning how to disappear politely.

But Pride means something different to me now.

Not less.

More.

Maybe deeper. Maybe quieter in places. Sharper, maybe.

Less interested in being understood by everyone. Less impressed by polite applause. Less willing to mistake tolerance for freedom.

Because somewhere along the way, I realized something that felt almost rude to say out loud:

I don’t want to be accepted anymore.

I know. That sounds strange during Pride Month.

Acceptance is supposed to be the dream, right?

The thing we march for. The thing we come out for. The thing families are applauded for offering after years of making love feel conditional. The thing companies put in rainbow-colored statements every June before returning to regularly scheduled caution in July.

Acceptance sounds generous.

Kind, even.

And listen, I understand why it matters.

For people who are unsafe, acceptance can mean shelter. For kids in hostile homes, acceptance can mean survival. For people whose rights are debated by strangers, acceptance can mean policy, protection, medicine, jobs, housing, and the ability to walk through the world without constantly calculating danger.

I am not dismissing that.

I know what acceptance can cost.

I also know what it can save.

I will never shame anyone for needing it.

But I am talking about something else now. I am talking about the version of acceptance that still leaves someone else in charge.

Because acceptance has a hierarchy built into it.

Someone accepts. Someone is accepted.

Someone holds the door. Someone waits outside hoping they look respectable enough to be let in.

And I am tired of living at the mercy of other people’s doors.

For a long time, I wanted acceptance badly. Of course I did.

Most queer people are trained to want it before we even understand what it costs.

We want our families to accept us. Our churches. Our schools. Our workplaces. Our hometowns. Our governments. Our lovers. The stranger on the sidewalk whose glance tells us whether the room is safe.

We want the world to look at us and say:

Fine. You can stay.

But eventually, if you are lucky, you begin to ask a harder question.

Stay where? And as what?

Because sometimes acceptance is just another word for conditional access.

You can stay if you are not too loud.

You can stay if you are not too angry.

You can stay if your queerness is tasteful.

You can stay if your disability is inspiring but not inconvenient.

You can stay if your pain is productive.

You can stay if your joy is marketable.

You can stay if your body, your love, your needs, your history, your hunger, and your grief can all be arranged into something other people know how to digest.

That is not freedom. That is etiquette.

And I did not survive this long to become well-mannered evidence of someone else’s open-mindedness.

There is a particular kind of queer person the world loves to accept.

Successful, but not threatening.

Funny, but not furious.

Stylish, but not political.

Romantic, but not sexual in a way that makes anyone uncomfortable.

Sad only when useful.

Brave only when inspirational.

Different, but not difficult.

Visible, but not demanding.

The acceptable queer person can be used in a campaign. Placed on a panel. Invited to the table. Celebrated in June. Quoted in the newsletter. Smiled at in a meeting.

They are proof that the system is working.

Look. We included one. Isn’t everyone proud?

And some of us learn that performance early.

We learn to make ourselves palatable. We learn which parts of the story get sympathy and which parts make people shift in their chairs. We learn how to say “my husband” in a way that sounds charming but not confrontational.

We learn when to laugh. When to soften. When to make our trauma useful. When to let straight people feel brave for loving us anyway.

We learn how to be the kind of queer person people feel good about accepting.

And then, if we are not careful, we mistake that for liberation.

It isn’t. It is a costume.

A prettier one than shame, maybe.

But still a costume.

Respectability is a clever little trap because it often arrives dressed as safety.

Be successful enough, and they will respect you. Be attractive enough, and they will desire you. Be articulate enough, and they will listen. Be funny enough, and they will forgive the parts of you that scare them. Be partnered enough, polished enough, professional enough, impressive enough, and maybe no one will treat your existence like a question mark.

Maybe.

That is the bargain.

And I understand the temptation.

I have made versions of that bargain in my own life. I have tried to be charming when I wanted to be furious. I have tried to be easy when I needed help. I have tried to make deafness sound manageable so people would not feel guilty about forgetting what access required.

I have tried to make queerness sound elegant when what I really meant was sweaty, complicated, hungry, sacred, ridiculous, wounded, hilarious, and alive.

I have tried to be impressive enough that no one could dismiss me. I have tried to make success do the work that safety never did.

And honestly?

Sometimes it worked. That is the annoying part.

Respectability can open doors. Beauty can open doors. Polish can open doors. Achievement can open doors.

But doors are not the same as freedom.

That is the thing I keep coming back to.

The door is not the destination.

Being allowed into a room is not the same as being free inside it. Being praised is not the same as being known. Being tolerated is not the same as being loved. Being useful is not the same as being safe. Being visible is not the same as being whole.

And being accepted is not the same as belonging.

Belonging does not require you to audition. Belonging does not make you edit the parts of yourself that arrive inconveniently. Belonging does not celebrate your identity in June and punish its actual needs in July. Belonging does not ask you to be grateful for partial dignity. Belonging does not confuse silence with harmony.

Belonging does not require you to become less alive so other people can feel more comfortable standing near you.

Acceptance says: You may enter.

Belonging says: This was always yours too.

Freedom says: I was never waiting for you to decide.

That is the Pride I am interested in now.

Not acceptance.

Freedom.

Not the kind someone gives you.

The kind you practice. The kind you protect. The kind you build, badly at first, then better. The kind you return to after you betray yourself. The kind you choose again after realizing you were still trying to be good for people who never had to earn your goodness.

Freedom is not always loud.

Sometimes it is.

Sometimes freedom is dancing shirtless in bad lighting while a remix rearranges your nervous system. Sometimes it is a drag queen walking into daylight like the sun should be grateful. Sometimes it is a kiss in public. Sometimes it is a body in glitter. Sometimes it is a parade, a protest, a scream, a heel, a flag, a song, a hand lifted high enough to be seen from the back of the crowd.

But sometimes freedom is quieter.

More private. More dangerous.

Freedom is asking for captions without apologizing. Freedom is leaving the party when lipreading has turned your brain into soup. Freedom is saying no to the family system that trained you to confuse access with love. Freedom is telling the truth even when it makes the story less convenient. Freedom is not making your pain inspirational before you have even had time to grieve it.

Freedom is letting yourself want more than survival.

More than politeness. More than being someone’s favorite exception.

Freedom is refusing to be the manageable version of yourself.

That one is hard.

Because the manageable version gets rewarded. The manageable version gets invited back. The manageable version keeps things smooth. The manageable version does not ask for too much, need too much, want too much, reveal too much, feel too much, or risk too much. The manageable version knows how to smile at nonsense and call it professionalism. The manageable version has excellent manners and a terrible relationship with their own body.

I have been that version.

I do not hate him.

He kept me alive in rooms where honesty would have cost too much. He learned the rules. He adapted. He made people comfortable.

He got me through.

But I will not build the rest of my life around him.

That is what Pride means to me now.

Not killing the old survival versions of myself.

Thanking them. Then taking the keys.

The polite version. The impressive version. The easy version. The palatable version. The one who made jokes to smooth over discomfort. The one who acted grateful for crumbs because crumbs were better than hunger.

The one who believed being loved meant being chosen by people who had the power to unchoose him.

Thank you.

You got us here.

But you do not get to drive anymore.

Because the life I want now is not designed around being acceptable.

It is designed around being mine.

That sounds simple until you try it.

A life that is actually yours will offend people who liked you better as a performance. It will confuse people who benefited from your self-abandonment. It will disappoint anyone who preferred your survival to your appetite. And it will absolutely irritate people who thought your healing would make you quieter.

This is one of the great scams of personal growth, by the way.

People love healing when it makes you gentle. They are less enthusiastic when healing makes you unavailable for old patterns.

They love boundaries in theory. Less so when the boundary is aimed at them.

They love authenticity until it stops flattering them.

They love queer joy until it gets loud enough to make them remember how much control they were hoping to keep.

But I am no longer interested in becoming acceptable to people who require my reduction as the price of peace.

I want a life with teeth.

A life with color. A life with music I feel in my bones. A life with dogs underfoot and salt on my skin.

A life with desire in it. Art in it. Mess in it.

A life where I can be soft and still sharp. Deaf and still loud. Grown and still playful. Ambitious and still human. Sexual and still sacred. Private and still visible. Unfinished and still worthy.

A life where I do not have to turn every hard thing into a lesson before I am allowed to simply say: That hurt.

A life where access is not treated like special treatment. A life where queerness is not reduced to representation. A life where my body is not an apology.

A life where joy is not evidence against me.

That is the thing I wish someone had told me earlier: Freedom is not just coming out.

Sometimes coming out is only the first door.

Then there are other closets. Respectability. Perfection. Professionalism. Beauty. Success. Marriage. Wellness. Inspiration.

The endless little rooms where you can hide inside things that look, from the outside, like winning.

You can be openly gay and still hiding. You can be successful and still hiding. You can be loved and still hiding. You can be visible and still hiding.

You can post the photo, say the word, hold the hand, wear the shirt, wave the flag, and still be arranging yourself into shapes that keep the wrong people comfortable.

That is not failure. That is survival residue.

It takes time to notice. It takes longer to stop.

Maybe Pride, at its best, helps us notice.

Not just the parts of ourselves we were forced to hide from others. The parts we learned to hide from ourselves. The hunger. The anger. The softness. The vanity. The grief. The erotic life. The ambition. The tenderness. The ridiculousness.

The parts that do not make us heroic.

The parts that make us whole.

That is the Pride I want now.

A Pride big enough for the entire person.

Not just the marketable slice. Not just the brave coming-out story. Not just the polished queer professional. Not just the beach photo. Not just the trauma. Not just the resilience. Not just the relationship. Not just the glitter.

All of it.

The contradiction. The ache. The body. The want. The humor. The damage. The survival. The becoming.

The part that still likes attention. The part that still wants to be held. The part that is still angry. The part that still believes in beauty. The part that refuses to be reduced to a cause, a caption, a category, or a cautionary tale.

I do not want to be accepted anymore.

I want to be free.

Free to be inconvenient. Free to need what I need. Free to be understood by fewer people and known by better ones. Free to stop auditioning for rooms that were never big enough. Free to let some people misunderstand me without rushing to correct the record. Free to stop making my life a debate club for strangers with bad theology and worse lighting. Free to be too much for people who were hoping I would remain manageable.

Free to become someone even I have not fully met yet.

That, to me, is the deeper promise of Pride.

Not that everyone will clap. Not that everyone will understand. Not that everyone will approve. Not that every room will open.

But that one day, maybe, you stop confusing permission with possibility. You stop mistaking the door for the destination. You stop shrinking just because someone else built a smaller room.

And you begin building something else.

A life. A real one.

Acceptance may be the first door.

I just refuse to call it the whole house.

I want a life that does not require me to leave my teeth at the door. A life that does not punish my joy. A life that does not need to be palatable before it is precious. A life that belongs to me before anyone else decides whether they can handle it.

So no.

I do not want to be accepted anymore.

Acceptance was the entry-level dream.

Freedom is the real one.

And I am done waiting outside the door.

👁️ THIS WEEK’S SILENT HORRORS

If this essay is about refusing the bargain of acceptability, this week’s Silent Horrors story is about what happens when obedience starts to feel like relief.

It Hurt Less When I Obeyed follows Ray, an older gay activist whose body still carries the memory of protest, police violence, loss, found family, and survival.

Then his pain begins to change.

It stops warning him. It starts instructing him. Turn here. Stay quiet. Carry this. Go where it tells you.

And every time he obeys, it hurts less.

A queer horror story about pain, compliance, and the terrifying seduction of relief.

Read It Hurt Less When I Obeyed next.

https://open.substack.com/pub/silenthorrors/p/it-hurt-less-when-i-obeyed?r=19hwko&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true

🎵 SOUNDTRACK OF REINVENTION

This essay needed a song that doesn’t ask permission to heal.

“Night Therapy” is the sound of walking onto the dance floor not to be chosen, not to be approved, not to be made acceptable… but to remember your body belongs to you.

It’s bass as exorcism. Glitter as armor. Sweat as baptism.

Not closure. Something hotter. Something less polite.

The manageable version can stay home.

This one came to move.

Not on vacation. Not for a semester.

I just... live here now.

The kid who spent years staring out windows and dreaming about elsewhere would’ve assumed this was the ending of a movie.

Instead it’s mostly grocery runs, dog hair, and arguing with geckos about who owns the bathroom.

2. I have four dogs.

Four.

At some point I accidentally became the kind of person who can identify which dog sighed from another room.

I know their personalities. I know their grudges. I know who’s starting drama.

It’s basically Real Housewives, but everyone sheds…

So basically just Real Housewives.

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Not in a dramatic, movie-villain way.

Nobody gathered around a long mahogany table beneath a flickering chandelier and said, “What shall we do about this flamboyant child?”

It was much more ordinary than that.

Which somehow made it worse.

The problem was my hands. They moved too much.

The problem was my voice. Too expressive.

The problem was my interests. Too theatrical.

The problem was my softness. Too visible.

The problem was that I loved music and costumes and stories and sparkly things and big dramatic feelings. The problem was that I could name every Disney princess but couldn’t tell you a damn thing about football. The problem was that I did not seem to understand, or at least refused to accept, the sacred Southern commandment that boys should become men by slowly turning into their fathers.

Adults rarely said, “We need to make this child less gay.”

That would have been too honest.

Instead, they used different words.

“Toughen up.”

“Man up.”

“Stop acting like that.”

“Don’t be so sensitive.”

“Don’t embarrass us.”

“People are going to talk.”

As if people talking was the worst thing that could happen. As if silence hadn’t already done enough damage.

So I learned early that being myself came with consequences.

Not always punishment.

Sometimes just a look. A silence. A sudden tightening in the room. The way adults stop laughing when a child accidentally tells the truth with his whole body.

I didn’t know I was gay yet. Not in any clean, language-based way.

But I knew there were parts of me that made people nervous.

And because children are brilliant little survival machines, I started collecting data. This made them laugh. This made them proud. This made them tense. This made their faces change. This made the room dangerous.

That is one of the quieter cruelties of growing up queer in a place that doesn’t know what to do with you. You learn yourself through other people’s discomfort. You learn which parts of your joy are allowed to enter the room and which parts need to wait outside, quiet and ashamed, like they weren’t part of you at all.

But sometimes joy slips through anyway.

Mine usually wore heels. Or wings. Or carried a Barbie.

One of my earliest memories involves my grandfather’s semi-truck, a hot Florida parking lot, and a Barbie being introduced to the open road.

My grandfather, Poppa, was a real truck driver. Old-school. Teamster. Forearms like cured hams. The kind of man who probably considered emotional vulnerability a suspicious coastal invention.

Every Christmas, he gave me a toy big rig. Every Christmas, I politely rolled it around for five minutes before returning to the much more urgent business of dolls, fashion, and whatever narrative arc Barbie was currently surviving.

He never got the hint.

One day, my mother and grandmother took me to his truck yard to see him off on a haul. I brought my toy car case, because priorities. Poppa, clearly thrilled that I was finally showing interest in his world of diesel, gears, and manly road dust, lifted me into the cab of his semi.

He thought he was inducting me into the Brotherhood of the Open Road. I was launching a full-scale Barbie narrative.

The truck cab was not a truck cab to me. It was a set. A stage. A life-size Dream Camper with a steering wheel, a CB radio, and excellent dramatic potential.

I opened my little toy case, pulled out Barbie, and placed her proudly in the driver’s seat. She was not just any Barbie. She was dressed for the road. Ken’s jeans for practicality. A sparkly top for glamour. Hair styled with intent.

This was a working woman. Independent. Mobile. Union-adjacent. Hauling dreams and accessories across state lines.

Naturally, I began bouncing her across the dashboard making truck noises.

“Look!” I said, beaming. “She’s a truck driver just like Poppa!”

And there it was. The silence. That awful, sudden adult silence. The kind children feel before they understand.

The air changed.

My family froze like I had just committed a federal crime in plastic heels. Poppa’s face shifted from confusion to horror to anger. He yanked me out of that truck so fast you’d think Barbie had been smuggling contraband.

“Boys don’t play with dolls.”

That was the lesson.

Not “the truck is dangerous.”

Not “be careful.”

Not “don’t climb around in a cab.”

The emergency was joy.

The emergency was imagination.

The emergency was that I had taken the symbol he offered me… the truck, the manhood, the legacy… and turned it into a story that made sense to me.

That was the real offense.

He thought he was showing me who I should become.

I was already becoming someone else.

And then there was church. Because of course there was church. Church was where Southern families took their children to learn about love, forgiveness, eternal damnation, and the correct way to judge your neighbors while holding a casserole.

Every Christmas, we had a pageant.

And every Christmas, there was Mary. Mary got the blue robe. Mary got the glow. Mary got to cradle the baby Jesus while everyone cooed like she had personally invented motherhood.

And every year, I sat in the second row of children dressed as something deeply beneath my potential. Third wise man. Cow with a speaking part. Tree Near Inn. No lines. No movement. Just bark and shame.

But one year, everything changed.

That year, Angel Gabriel got a solo.

Now, in a normal church pageant, Angel Gabriel would have been played by a sweet, soft-spoken girl with a tinsel halo and the emotional range of a hymnbook.

But I had other plans. I campaigned. I auditioned. I cornered the pageant director during donut fellowship and told her, with the grave sincerity only a dramatic child can summon, that I felt God was calling me to this role.

And honestly? Who was she to argue with the Lord?

She cast me, with one condition.

“Keep it simple and reverent.”

Sure, Jan.

I immediately got to work. The vocal line needed help. Nothing disrespectful. Just a tasteful key change. Some phrasing. Maybe a riff or two.

Annunciation, after all, is a major plot point. If you are going to tell Mary she has been chosen by God to carry the Savior of the world, you should not do it like you are reading a lunch menu.

Then came movement. Not choreography. Expression. A reach toward heaven. A turn. A little sway. Maybe one tasteful hip thrust that said divine messenger meets backup dancer in a televised gospel special.

Then came the robe. The church expected a white sheet and Velcro wings.

I expected spectacle.

I created a full angelic ensemble. Satin. Gold trim. Cinched waist. Flowing cape. Wings made with actual chicken feathers, because if I was going to be the messenger of God, I was not doing it in sad felt from the craft closet.

Opening night arrived. The sanctuary was packed. Parents. Grandparents. Pastor Dan, who had opinions about “deviant hairdressers” and preached like homosexuality had personally keyed his car.

The pageant began. A sheep wandered away. Joseph forgot a line. Baby Jesus’ head nearly detached from his holy little doll body.

Then the lights shifted. My moment had arrived.

I stepped forward.

Angel Gabriel. Child of glory. Messenger of the Lord. Jazz hands gently concealed beneath flowing sleeves.

And I belted. Not sang.

Belted.

With breath support. With riffs. With the full conviction of a child who had been waiting his whole life to be seen and had mistaken a church pageant for the Tony Awards.

I was not trying to make a statement. I was not trying to defy anyone. I was not thinking, “This is a radical act of queer resistance inside a conservative religious space.”

I was just happy.

That is the part people miss. Queer children are so often accused of being provocative when we are simply delighted. We are told we are making a scene when we are simply entering one.

We are told we are too much when the truth is that our joy arrived before shame had time to finish training us.

And when you are a child, you do not understand why your joy makes adults afraid. You only understand that something beautiful in you causes the room to harden.

That was the beginning of the problem.

Not that I was too much.

That my muchness had witnesses. And witnesses have opinions.

So I tried, for years, to manage myself.

To edit. To scan the room. To become acceptable.

It did not work, obviously.

I am, by nature, a poor candidate for subtlety.

But I tried. I tried because the farm was small. The town was smaller. The church was everywhere.

The religion I had been forced into did not just live in the pews. It followed you home. It sat at the kitchen table. It crawled into your body. It told you what to fear before you even knew what you wanted.

I grew up surrounded by people who thought the world was safest when everyone stayed inside their assigned shape.

Boys became men. Men became hard. Women became quiet. Children became obedient.

Faith became control.

Love became something that came with conditions written in invisible ink.

And I was none of those things in the correct way.

I was a boy who wanted Wonder Woman Underroos.

A boy who gave monologues to cows.

A boy who turned a semi-truck cab into Barbie’s cross-country feminist logistics company.

A boy who looked at Angel Gabriel and thought, finally, a role with range.

So eventually, I did what generations of queer kids before me have done.

I left.

I fled the farm. I fled the town. I fled the church. I fled the family system that had taught me to confuse love with correction.

I fled the smallness that had been handed to me like inheritance.

And I moved to New York City by myself for college.

I wish I could say I arrived fully formed. I did not.

I did not step off a bus into the warm embrace of my liberated future while a chorus of gay angels harmonized over Times Square.

I arrived scared. Hungry. Overstimulated. Carrying more shame than luggage.

But I had done the one thing I needed to do.

I had gotten out.

And New York gave me something my hometown never could.

Room. Not easy room. Not gentle room.

New York does not gently hand you freedom. It throws you into a subway car with three drag queens, a screaming baby, a man eating noodles out of a takeout container with his fingers, and a woman applying mascara with the precision of a surgeon while the train lurches under the city.

But it gives you room. Room to see people living loudly. Room to see queer adults who had survived. Room to see men who loved men without whispering. Room to see artists, dancers, actors, writers, bartenders, beautiful disasters, lonely geniuses, aging queens, baby gays, and people who had clearly built whole identities out of refusing to ask permission.

New York did not heal me all at once.

That is not how healing works. Healing is not a montage. It is not one makeover, one kiss, one perfect apartment, one chosen family dinner under twinkle lights.

Healing is slower.

Meaner.

Less cinematic.

It is realizing, years later, that a voice in your head is not actually yours.

It is hearing someone compliment the thing you were taught to hate and not knowing where to put the feeling.

It is finding yourself in a bar, laughing too loudly, and suddenly realizing nobody is coming to punish you for it.

It is dancing without checking who is watching. It is learning that attraction does not have to feel like danger. It is learning that God was never the problem. The people using God as a weapon were.

It is learning that shame can feel like truth when it has lived in your body long enough.

New York did not make me proud overnight.

It made pride imaginable.

That was enough.

Slowly, I began becoming myself.

Not the Instagram version. Not the inspirational version.

The awkward version. The messy version. The version who still overthought every room. The version who wanted to be desired and feared being seen. The version who could be brave onstage and terrified in bed. The version who had escaped but still carried the map of the cage inside him.

That is something people do not always understand about queer survival.

Leaving is not the same as being free.

Sometimes you leave the place.

Then spend years evicting it from your nervous system.

I came out. I built a life. I loved. I worked. I performed. I wrote.

I became the kind of person younger me would have stared at in public with a mixture of awe, terror, and jealousy.

And still, some old part of me kept negotiating.

How visible is too visible? How honest is too honest?

How gay is too gay?

How much of myself can I bring into this room before someone decides I have made them uncomfortable?

Then I lost my hearing.

Suddenly. Permanently. Cruelly.

One day, the world sounded one way. Then it didn’t.

People love stories about overcoming adversity. They like them clean. They like the part where the disabled person learns an inspiring lesson and everyone gets to feel moved without having to think too hard about access, grief, loneliness, or how exhausting it is to fight a world that keeps forgetting you are in it.

The truth is messier.

Losing my hearing was devastating.

It changed my body. My relationships. My career. My sense of safety. My sense of self. It made the world harder to navigate in a thousand tiny ways people rarely notice because they do not have to.

It took sound and replaced it with vigilance.

Lipreading. Guessing. Scanning. Positioning myself carefully in rooms. Fighting for captions. Explaining. Re-explaining. Smiling while people forgot. Laughing when I missed the joke because sometimes dignity is exhausting and you need to get through dinner.

At first, I thought deafness would make me smaller.

How could it not?

I had spent my whole life surviving by reading rooms, performing well, connecting quickly, staying charming, staying useful, staying ahead of discomfort.

Then suddenly the rules changed.

I could not perform hearing anymore.

Not well. Not consistently. Not without paying for it in exhaustion.

And something in me broke.

Then something better broke open.

Because losing my hearing taught me a brutal kind of freedom.

When something that fundamental changes, when your body redraws the terms of your life without asking permission, you stop having patience for people who expect you to keep performing ease for their comfort.

I had spent years managing other people’s expectations.

Deafness made that impossible.

And honestly?

Thank God.

Because once I stopped trying to make the world comfortable with my deafness, I started noticing all the other places I had been making myself smaller too.

My queerness.

My creativity.

My body.

My desire.

My ambition.

My voice.

My stories.

My joy.

I stopped giving as many fucks.

Not all of them. Let’s not get carried away. I am still a writer, which means I can turn one lukewarm comment into a six-act psychological event if left unsupervised.

But something real shifted.

I stopped believing discomfort was always my problem to solve. I stopped treating visibility like a threat. I stopped asking for permission to take up space in rooms I had already earned the right to enter.

Deafness did not make me proud.

But it made me done.

Done pretending. Done shrinking. Done translating myself into softer shapes for people committed to misunderstanding me anyway.

And that bled into everything.

My writing got sharper. My queerness got louder. My creativity got hungrier. My life got bigger.

I wrote the stories I had spent years circling. I started telling the truth about the little boy on the farm. The one with Barbie in the truck cab. The one in the chicken-feather wings. The one who wanted to be Mary and settled for transforming Gabriel into a featured role.

The one who was not too much.

The one who was simply alive in a world that preferred him edited.

I wrote music from the body I had left after sound changed. I wrote a musical about queer joy as rebellion. I moved to Costa Rica and let the ocean teach me a different rhythm. I built a life full of dogs, sweat, salt, stories, desire, grief, humor, and a strange amount of swimwear.

I became, slowly and imperfectly, harder to shrink.

And that is what Pride means to me now.

Not rainbow logos. Not corporate captions. Not seasonal allyship with a June expiration date.

Pride is older than branding.

Pride is what happens when survival becomes visible.

Pride is the drag queen who walks into daylight.

The queer elder who tells the truth before history can bury it.

The trans kid who knows their name before the world catches up.

The deaf person who stops apologizing for needing access.

The late bloomer who finally stops asking whether it is too late.

The small-town gay kid who makes it out and spends the rest of his life becoming the person everyone tried to prevent.

Pride is not simply celebrating that we are different.

Pride is celebrating that we survived people who wanted us to be less.

Less loud.

Less soft.

Less strange.

Less visible.

Less hungry.

Less holy.

Less ourselves.

But here we are.

Still here.

Still queer.

Still becoming.

And if that makes some people uncomfortable?

Good.

Discomfort has had plenty of time to speak.

Now it’s our turn.

The problem was never my hands. Or my voice. Or Barbie. Or Broadway. Or boys. Or softness. Or deafness. Or joy.

The problem was never that I was too much.

The problem was that other people had very small ideas about who I was allowed to become.

And baby?

I outgrew them.

👁️ THIS WEEK’S SILENT HORRORS

If this essay is about refusing to become smaller, this week’s Silent Horrors story is about the terrifying bargain of becoming “acceptable.”

A Normal Life follows Lydia and Elena inside Saint Germaine Apartments, where queer love, exhaustion, safety, and erasure start to blur into something much more frightening.

Because sometimes the horror isn’t that the world wants to destroy you.

Sometimes the horror is that the world offers to make you easier to love.

Calmer.
Quieter.
Cleaner.
More normal.

And something beneath the floor is listening.

Read A Normal Life next… a queer horror story about the cost of being made acceptable.

https://open.substack.com/pub/silenthorrors/p/a-normal-life?r=19hwko&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true

🎵 SOUNDTRACK OF REINVENTION

This essay needed a song with teeth.

“Read My Lips” is the sound of finally outgrowing the lie that survival means staying small. It’s for every version of me that was told to tone it down, toughen up, man up, shut up, behave, blend in, and become easier to explain.

No.

Read my lips:

I’m not breaking.
I’m not shrinking.
I’m doing just fine.

And that is exactly the Pride energy I’m carrying now.

Nobody warns you what happens when the dream actually works.

For years, all your energy goes into escaping.

Escaping the job. The city. The relationship.

The version of yourself that no longer fits.

You spend years staring at some distant horizon, convinced that everything will finally make sense once you get there.

Once I move. Once I leave. Once I start over. Once I become the person I’m supposed to be.

The dream becomes a destination. A finish line. A promised land. A place where Future You finally gets their act together.

And then one day, somehow, against all odds, you get there.

And that’s when the weird part starts.

Because nobody prepares you for the fact that you still wake up as yourself.

There are mornings now when I drink coffee on my balcony in Costa Rica and stare at mountains that disappear into the clouds.

Years ago, that version of my life felt impossible.

Not unlikely. Impossible.

The kind of thing I daydreamed about while sitting in offices under fluorescent lights. The kind of thing I imagined while surviving things I wasn’t sure I’d survive. The kind of life I promised myself I would build someday if I could just make it through whatever was in front of me.

I thought moving here would feel like crossing a finish line. I thought there would be some moment where everything clicked into place. A soundtrack swelling in the background. A dramatic realization. A feeling of arrival.

Instead, I discovered something deeply inconvenient.

I brought myself with me.

The same brain. The same fears. The same insecurities. The same tendency to overthink a text message. The same voice that occasionally whispers that I’m behind. The same questions about money. Career. Aging. Purpose.

The scenery changed.

I didn’t magically become a different person.

Same fear. Better view.

And for a while, that felt like failure.

Because nobody tells you that getting what you wanted can feel alarmingly similar to discovering you still have problems.

Read more

You tell yourself you’ll rest... after.

After the project. After the deadline. After the house is clean. After the inbox is empty. After the workout. After the crisis. After you’ve finally gotten your life together.

And somehow... “after” never arrives.

Because rest isn’t actually waiting on the task.

It’s waiting on permission.

That’s the part nobody wants to admit. A lot of us don’t have a productivity problem.

We have a worthiness problem.

We think rest is something you earn. A reward. A trophy. A little gold star for being sufficiently useful.

So every time we’re tired, we immediately open negotiations.

“Did I do enough?”

“Have I earned a break?”

“Could I push a little harder?”

“Maybe just one more thing.”

And if you’re anything like me? One more thing is never one more thing. It’s twelve.

And a side quest.

And somehow reorganizing your entire life at 11:30 PM.

Because exhaustion feels strangely safer than stopping. At least when you’re moving, you don’t have to hear yourself think.

Let’s be honest. Some of us would rather burn out than sit quietly with our own nervous system.

Which sounds dramatic.

Until you realize how many people are currently treating fatigue like a personality trait. Everyone is tired. Everyone is overwhelmed. Everyone is “just pushing through.”

Meanwhile half the country is doom-scrolling, overworking, under-sleeping, stress-eating, stress-drinking, stress-shopping, stress-dating, stress-existing...

and calling it resilience.

I especially see this in people who grew up with conditional approval.

People who learned: attention follows achievement, love follows usefulness, safety follows performance.

Those lessons don’t disappear. They just grow up and get corporate email addresses.

So now you’re sitting on the couch answering Slack messages at 10 PM because some ancient part of your brain still believes: “If I stop being useful, bad things happen.”

That’s not ambition. That’s survival wearing a sassy business suit.

And look... I understand the appeal.

Rest feels irresponsible when you’ve built your identity around being dependable.

But here’s the problem: The body doesn’t care about your personal branding.

It doesn’t care that you’re the strong one.

The reliable one.

The high achiever.

The fixer.

The helper.

The one who always gets it done.

Eventually the bill arrives. And the body always collects.

Anxiety. Insomnia. Irritability. Resentment. Brain fog. Exhaustion so deep it starts feeling like your personality.

Then we act shocked. As if the machine we never shut off eventually overheated.

The thing I’ve been learning lately is this:

Rest isn’t the thing you earn after life. It’s the thing that allows you to have one.

Read that again.

Rest isn’t a reward. It’s infrastructure.

You don’t earn water.

You don’t earn oxygen.

You don’t earn sleep.

And you don’t earn rest.

You require it.

The world will happily hand you an endless list of reasons to keep going. There will always be another email. Another problem. Another headline. Another crisis. Another person needing something.

The work is deciding that your humanity matters before everything is finished.

Because everything is never finished.

That’s the scam.

You keep waiting for the moment when you’ve finally done enough to stop. The moment never comes.

So here’s the shift: Rest before you’re empty. Stop before you’re broken. Pause before you’re forced to.

You do not need to collapse to qualify. You do not need to suffer to deserve relief. You do not need to prove your value before taking care of yourself.

The exhaustion is not evidence that you’re trying hard enough.

And the fact that you’re tired doesn’t mean you need to earn rest.

It means you need rest.

So here’s the next one:

Fuck earning rest.

Just take the nap.

This Week’s Silent Horrors

As a darker companion piece to this week’s essay, I published a new Silent Horrors story: The Hunger Wasn’t Mine.

It’s about a man who spends years trying to become better. More disciplined. More desirable. More admired. More worthy.

And no matter how much he gives, something inside him keeps asking for more.

That’s what unsettled me while writing it. Because the monster isn’t really hunger. It’s the belief that enough is always somewhere ahead of you.

One more improvement. One more achievement. One more version of yourself to become.

The same belief that tells us: You can rest later. You can stop later. You can finally exhale once you’ve earned it.

But later never arrives.

Like most Silent Horrors stories, this isn’t really about monsters. It’s about the terrifying ideas we build our lives around. And what happens when they become impossible to satisfy.

If you’ve ever felt trapped in the cycle of proving, improving, fixing, or earning... this one might hit a little close to home.

Silent Horrors

The Hunger Wasn't Mine

The first thing my body ate without me was ground beef…

Read more

2 months ago · 9 likes · 2 comments · Waymon Hudson

🎵 SOUNDTRACK OF REINVENTION

Through My Skin: Stay Through the Storm

This week’s essay is about rest. Not collapse. Not burnout. Not finally falling apart.

Rest.

The kind most of us keep postponing until we’ve earned it.

Which is why I’ve been thinking about Stay Through the Storm from my debut album Through My Skin.

On the surface, it’s a love song. But underneath, it’s really about something else: The courage to stop bracing. To stop performing strength every second. To stop believing you have to carry everything alone.

For a long time, I treated rest like weakness. Like if I relaxed, stopped proving, stopped pushing, something important would fall apart.

What I’ve slowly been learning is that rest isn’t quitting. It’s trust. Trust that not everything depends on you. Trust that you don’t have to earn your right to breathe. Trust that you can stay through the storm without becoming the storm.

And honestly?

That lesson has changed more of my life than working harder ever did.

1. Visibility is a strange truth serum.

The bigger your life gets, the more interesting people’s reactions become.

Not strangers. People who already knew you.

Some people get excited. Some people get weird. Some people suddenly become historians.

“Remember when you used to...”

“You’re different now...”

“That’s not really you...”

Which is fascinating, because nobody ever says that when you’re becoming smaller. Only when you’re becoming harder to predict.

I’m still collecting data…

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Only managed. Adjusted. Minimized. Monitored. Explained.

You can tell. Because they never fully arrive.

They sit carefully. Laugh carefully. Dress carefully. Move carefully.

Like their body is a public mistake they’re trying to make less noticeable.

And maybe that sounds dramatic.

But I don’t think it is.

I think a lot of us learned very early that being fully visible came with consequences.

Especially if you were:

• queer

• Black or brown

• feminine

• butch

• trans

• bigger-bodied

• disabled

• too sexual

• too loud

• too soft

• too different in any direction

At some point, somebody taught you: your body was a problem to solve.

Too much. Too obvious. Too wanting. Too visible.

So you adapted.

You learned how to hold yourself smaller. Not just physically. Emotionally.

You learned: which gestures got mocked, which clothes got attention, which desires made people uncomfortable, which parts of you needed editing before entering a room…

And after a while? You stopped noticing you were doing it.

That’s the part I keep thinking about: how shame becomes choreography.

You don’t even consciously choose it anymore. Your body just knows the routine.

Pull the shirt down.
Cross the arms.
Lower the voice.
Take up less space.
Don’t move like that.
Don’t look too long.
Don’t want too openly.

And eventually… you confuse shame for personality. You call yourself: reserved, awkward, low-maintenance, private…

Maybe. Or maybe you were trained to treat your body like a liability

And to be clear: shame works.

That’s why people keep performing it. Shame keeps you employable. Palatable. Less threatening. Less visible.

It teaches you how to survive rooms that were never built for you.

But survival is not the same thing as freedom. And eventually the performance starts costing you.

Because you can’t fully experience pleasure inside a body you’re constantly apologizing for.

That’s the collision point no one talks about enough: shame and sensuality cannot coexist peacefully.

You cannot fully feel yourself while simultaneously managing yourself.

And this goes deeper than sex. Though yes, sex lives here too. Especially queer sex. Especially disabled bodies. Especially anyone taught they should feel grateful to be desired at all.

That’s the poison.

Not: “I’m undesirable.”

Worse: “I should be thankful anyone wanted me in the first place.”

Fuck that.

Your body is not a charity project. It is not a debate. It is not a negotiation with other people’s comfort.

And honestly?

Some of the most powerful moments in my life have come from realizing: I wasn’t actually ashamed.

I was performing shame because other people expected me to.

That distinction changes everything. Because inherited shame feels personal until you start tracing where it came from.

The church. School. Family. Media. Bullies. Politics. The internet. Straight people. Other queer people. Capitalism. Beauty culture…

Take your pick.

Everybody had notes on your body. Everybody had conditions. Everybody had rules for how visible you were allowed to become. And eventually you absorbed them so completely you started enforcing them yourself.

That’s the trap.

You think the cage is your personality.

Until one day your body experiences something… joy, desire, attention, freedom, touch, movement, being fully seen… and suddenly you realize: Oh. I was never actually too much. I was restricted.

That’s the shift.

Your body does not need permission to exist fully. Not aesthetically. Not sexually. Not socially. Not politically.

You do not need to earn visibility.

You do not need to apologize for wanting things.

You do not need to shrink yourself to make other people comfortable with your existence.

And yes, some people will become uncomfortable when you stop performing shame.

Good.

Let them.

Because shame was never proof that something was wrong with you.

It was proof that something benefited from your silence.

So here’s the next one:

Fuck letting shame run your body.

🕯️ Silent Horrors - He’s a Good Boy

And as the darker mirror to this essay… this week’s Silent Horrors story asks a different question: What happens when something learns exactly how ashamed, lonely, touch-starved, and unseen you are… and realizes it can reach you through that?

Not by hurting you. By comforting you.

By becoming whatever keeps you isolated long enough to stop reaching for real people.

He’s a Good Boy is one of the most devastating things I’ve written in the series so far. And underneath all the horror, it’s really about this: the terrifying ease of mistaking emotional survival for connection.

Silent Horrors

He’s a Good Boy

Sarah texted me three months after I stopped sleeping alone…

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2 months ago · 5 likes · 4 comments · Waymon Hudson

🎧 Sound Track - Through My Skin

And honestly? The entire reason I made Through My Skin was because I got tired of treating my body like something broken, apologetic, or incomplete after losing my hearing.

I didn’t want to write music about overcoming. I wanted to write music about desire. Touch. Sweat. Loneliness. Pleasure. Queerness. Attention. Being wanted.

About reclaiming a body I had started experiencing as medicalized instead of alive.

That’s what this album really is.

Not “inspiration.” Reclamation.

Not: please understand me.

More: I’m done disappearing inside myself.

🎧 Through My Skin: out now on all platforms.

You think you’re walking away from a job. Or a city. Or a relationship. Or a version of yourself.

You imagine the hard part will be the leaving. You imagine people will either support you… or disagree… or not care.

What nobody tells you is there’s a secret third option: People get weird. Not loudly. Usually politely. Quietly.

The coworker who suddenly acts offended you took another opportunity. The friend who keeps making little comments about how you’ve changed.The family member who suddenly starts reminiscing about who you “used to be.” The ex who never wanted you back until somebody else did.

People start acting like your decision happened to them.

And at first, because you’re a decent person, you assume they must be hurt. You wonder if maybe you became selfish. Too ambitious. Too distant. Too much.

So you start doing something dangerous: You explain. You reassure. You over-thank. You shrink. You make your freedom sound smaller so people won’t feel abandoned by it.

But eventually… if you stay gone long enough… you realize something uncomfortable.

Some people never actually wanted you.

They wanted the version of you that made them feel safe.

The version that stayed nearby. Stayed available. Stayed understandable. Stayed in the role. Stayed reachable. Stayed exactly inconvenient enough to never outgrow the room.

And this part is hard to admit because it sounds… odd. But I don’t think most people are upset when someone leaves. I think they’re upset when someone leaving forces them to ask a question they weren’t planning to ask.

Wait… if they can do that… what excuse am I using?

That’s why people suddenly become historians. They start bringing up old versions of you.

“Remember when you used to…”

“You were happier when…”

“You never cared about…”

“This isn’t like you…”

Sometimes that’s love. Sometimes that’s fear wearing your memories as a costume.

Because old-you was easier. Old-you was predictable. Old-you kept the agreement. And leaving breaks agreements nobody admits existed.

You realize: some people loved you.

Some people loved access.

Some people loved proximity.

Some people loved usefulness.

And unfortunately those can feel identical for a very long time.

That doesn’t mean those people are evil. Most of the time they don’t even know they’re doing it. People build emotional furniture. And when you move, they’re shocked the room looks different.

But disappointment is not evidence you made the wrong choice. People being uncomfortable with your change does not automatically mean your change was harmful.

Sometimes it just means your growth interrupted a story they were telling themselves.

And eventually, if you keep going, something quieter happens. People stop arguing. People stop explaining. People stop asking when you’re coming back.

And suddenly… you notice something strange.

You’re not defending your choices anymore. You’re just living them.

That’s the quiet part nobody talks about. Freedom doesn’t usually arrive with fireworks. It arrives the day you stop writing apology emails in your own head.

And realize: the people who truly loved you… didn’t need old-you to survive.

If This Essay Landed…

There’s a line I kept thinking about while writing this: Sometimes people don’t leave because they stopped loving you. Sometimes they leave because something else showed up and felt easier.

That idea has been sitting inside my latest Silent Horrors story too: He’s a Good Boy.

It starts as a story about heartbreak. Then loneliness. Then something stranger.

About the things that show up when your life gets quiet enough.

And the dangerous line between being seen… and simply being available.

One small insider note for paid folks: This one quietly connects to The Shape Sitting on the Bed.

Read them together.

See what changes.

Silent Horrors

He’s a Good Boy

Sarah texted me three months after I stopped sleeping alone…

Read more

2 months ago · 5 likes · 4 comments · Waymon Hudson

What’s the catch?
How long is this going to last?
What’s this going to cost me?

You don’t say it out loud. But you feel it.

That not-so-subtle shift from: This feels good to What am I going to lose?

And just like that… you’re not in the moment anymore.

You’re in the aftermath.

I wrote recently about doubting joy. About how we question good things until they disappear. And about waiting to feel worthy before we let ourselves have them.

This is the layer underneath both.

You don’t just doubt the good thing. You assume it comes with a cost.

And to be clear, you didn’t make that up.

At some point, you learned good things don’t come clean, love comes with conditions, attention has expectations, and peace is temporary.

"There is no such thing as a free lunch.”

“Nothing good in life is free”

You learned that everything good eventually takes something with it.

So now? You prepare.

You scan for the hidden cost.

You look for the shift in tone. The moment it changes. The part where it stops being free.

Because if you can find it early… you can control it. Right?

That’s the logic.

But here’s what actually happens: you start pre-paying for things that were never going to charge you.

You tense in moments that were safe.
You detach from people who were present.
You question things that were real.

Not because something was wrong, but because you were waiting for it to be.

You call it awareness. You call it being careful. You call it protecting yourself.

But most of the time? You’re not protecting yourself.

You’re rehearsing loss.

And that rehearsal changes everything.

Because now, even when nothing goes wrong… it never fully feels right.

You don’t relax into it. You don’t trust it. You don’t let it land.

You hover. Half in. Half braced. Waiting for the hidden cost.

So when it does end (if it ends) you can say: I saw it coming.

And it will supposedly hurt less. Even though it still hurts every time.

But if it doesn’t end? You still never experienced it fully. That’s the trade.

You avoid being surprised… and miss being present.

This shows up everywhere.

In relationships: This is too easy… something’s off.

So you start looking for distance before it exists.

At work: This is going well… it won’t last.

So you hold back before anything actually changes.

In your life: Things feel good… this won’t stay.

So you start detaching before you have to.

And slowly, you create tension where there wasn’t any.

Not because something was wrong. Because you expected it to be.

Here’s the part that matters: not everything good in your life is waiting to take something from you.

Some things are just… good.

Not transactional.
Not conditional.
Not temporary in the way you’ve been taught to expect.

Just… available.

And the moment you stop scanning for the cost, you realize something uncomfortable: You were the one adding it.

Not always. Not intentionally. But consistently.

You were tightening before anything asked you to.

You were bracing before anything moved.

You were leaving before anything ended.

You weren’t protecting yourself. You were charging yourself for things that were free.

That’s the shift.

Let things be good without needing to balance them.

Let moments exist without calculating their end.

Let people show up without deciding what they’ll take from you.

Not blindly. Just honestly.

Because not everything in your life is a setup.

Some things don’t require payment.

And you don’t need to keep preparing for losses that never arrive.

So here’s the next one:

Fuck the hidden cost.

→ Check out all the essays in the “Fuck That” Series…

Also this week: a strange little companion piece.

Fuck That: The Hidden Cost Isn’t Always Real is about realizing the price you’ve been afraid to pay may not actually exist.

He Touched Me Like It Was Learning Something asks the opposite question:

What is something learned what you think love costs… and becoming very good at paying it.

(Warning: this one hurt to write.)

Silent Horrors

He Touched Me Like It Was Learning Something

Learning bodies is a lot like learning choreography…

Read more

2 months ago · 5 likes · 4 comments · Waymon Hudson

🎧 Soundtrack: Touch Me Like a Lie

And if this essay is about assuming every good thing comes with a cost…

“Touch Me Like a Lie” is what happens when you already expect the loss before it begins.

“I let you in, but I know the cost…”

That moment where you know it’s temporary, you know it might hurt, you know they probably won’t stay… and part of you steps in anyway.

Not because you’re naïve.

Because sometimes loneliness feels heavier than the damage you already know how to survive.

“This isn’t love, but god, it’s close.”

That’s the tension the song lives in… the ache of accepting something incomplete
because at least it feels like something.

🎧 Touch Me Like a Lie — from my album Through My Skin
Out now on all platforms.

I’ll enjoy it once I feel ready.
I’ll relax into it once I feel secure.
I’ll accept it once I feel like I deserve it.

Sounds responsible. It’s not.

Because “feeling worthy” is a moving target.

There’s always one more condition:

Once I’m more stable.
Once I’m more confident.
Once I’ve done enough.
Once I’ve proven something.

And until then? You wait. You hold back. You second-guess. You keep yourself just outside the experience.

Because you’ve decided: I’ll let myself have it… later.

But here’s the problem: later never arrives.

Because worthiness doesn’t show up first. It shows up after.

That’s the part nobody tells you.

You don’t feel worthy and then accept something good.

You accept something good… awkwardly, imperfectly, a little unsure… and your sense of worth adjusts to match it.

But if you never let yourself have the experience… you never update the belief.

So you get stuck in a loop: no experience → no evidence → no worthiness

And you call that “working on yourself.”

It’s not growth. It’s delay.

Because underneath all of this is a quieter fear.

Not just: What if this doesn’t last?

But: What if I was wrong to believe I deserved it at all?

That’s the risk you’re trying to avoid.

So you do something clever. You don’t fully step into it.

You stay a little detached. A little skeptical. A little unconvinced.

So if it falls apart? You can say: See? I knew it.

But if it doesn’t? You never really experienced it in the first place.

That’s the trade.

You protect yourself from being wrong… and miss the part where it was right.

This shows up everywhere.

In relationships:

I’ll open up once I feel safe enough.

In work:

I’ll go for it once I feel confident enough.

In joy:

I’ll enjoy this once I know it’s real.

And every time… you’re waiting to feel ready for something that makes you ready.

That’s the inversion. The experience is the thing that updates you.

Not the other way around.

You don’t prove you deserve it. You let it happen and adjust.

You don’t become worthy and then step in.

You step in… and your sense of worth catches up.

That’s the shift.

Let things be good before you fully believe they should be.

Let things land before you’ve justified them.

Let yourself have the experience without pre-approval.

Not recklessly. Just honestly.

Because not everything good in your life is waiting for you to qualify for it.

Some things are just… available.

And you’re standing there waiting for permission that was never required.

So here’s the next one:

Fuck “I’ll need to feel worthy first.”

🕯️ Silent Horrors: The Dog That Stopped Recognizing Me

This one lives on the other side of “worthiness.”

Because it’s what happens when something steps in… before you do.

The scariest part isn’t losing control. It’s realizing something else is moving through you more confidently than you ever did.

The Dog That Stopped Recognizing Me sits in that space:

where your body adjusts… your life gets easier… and something inside you feels less and less yours.

→ Read the full story

Silent Horrors

The Dog That Stopped Recognizing Me

The first alert is clean…

Read more

2 months ago · 4 likes · 2 comments · Waymon Hudson

🎧 Soundtrack: “Read My Lips”

And if this essay is about waiting to feel worthy…

Read My Lips is what happens when you stop waiting.

“You said ‘tone down,’ I said ‘bye’…”

That moment where you stop negotiating, you stop shrinking, and you stop asking if you deserve to be heard.

“Read my lips… I’m not breaking.”

This isn’t quiet confidence. It’s claimed presence.

Not “I finally feel worthy.”

But: I’m done asking if I am.

🎧 Read My Lips — from my album Through My Skin
Out now on all platforms