All these years I kept my true nature hidden, running along like a small shadow so nobody could catch me.
-Ying Ying

After that, I never managed to come back and show a lot of myself. I just had my child and kind of shielded her. I didn’t want people to come into our little bubble and I just stayed in it

...I was shut up inside that doll of myself and my true voice could not get out.

I couldn't tell her. I couldn't tell anyone. As long as I didn't say it aloud, it wasn't real.

So I learned to hold my tongue and to turn my features into an indifferent mask so that no one could ever read my thoughts.

We are lost, she and I, unseen and not seeing, unheard and not hearing, unknown by others.

She went for so long without talking that silence became a habit.

i am invisible understand, simply because people refuse to see me

I have packed myself into silence so deeply and for so long that I can never unpack myself using words. When I speak, I only pack myself a little differently.

My life is marked by long silences.

The little girl’s sense of secrecy that developed at prepuberty only grows in importance. She closes herself up in fierce solitude: she refuses to reveal to those around her the hidden self that she considers to be her real self and that is in fact an imaginary character: she plays at being a dancer like Tolstoy’s Natasha, or a saint like Marie Leneru, or simply the singular wonder that is herself. There is still an enormous difference between this heroine and the objective face that her parents and friends recognise in her. She is also convinced that she is misunderstood: her relationship with herself becomes even more passionate: she becomes intoxicated with her isolation, feels different, superior, exceptional: she promises that the future will take revenge on the mediocrity of her present life. From this narrow and petty existence she escapes by dreams.

Words as to the inner emotions do not come readily to me, for I have led an isolated life mentally and spiritually.

We live in a country that is wearing a veil of silence.

Though her soul requires seeing, the culture around her requires sightlessness. Though her soul wishes to speak its truth, she is pressured to be silent.