On the performance of openness, and what it keeps hidden.
There is a particular exhaustion that belongs to women who were never quiet.
Not the exhaustion of suppression, of swallowing words before they form, of learning early to make yourself smaller. That kind has been documented. But there is another kind, less often named, that belongs to the woman who speaks and is still not heard. Who expresses and is labeled. Who brings her full self into a room and watches it get reclassified as a problem.
Too much. Too emotional. Too intense. Too dramatic.
The woman who has been told she is too much has not been spared the work of hiding. She has simply learned to hide differently. Not her silence, but the meaning of her noise. She learns to express herself in acceptable ways and bury everything that doesn’t fit the frame she has been given. The result is not silence. It is a sophisticated performance of openness that conceals what matters most.
This is not a wellness problem. It is a cultural one. And until we name it as such, we will keep offering individual solutions to a collective wound.
What "Just Talk About It" Assumes
Mental health awareness, in its mainstream form, carries a particular assumption: that the barrier to getting help is not knowing you need it. That once you understand you’re struggling, the path forward is relatively clear. Talk to someone. Name what you feel. Ask for help.
But are people ready to listen?
For many women, particularly those navigating cultures where emotional expression has never been a neutral act, this instruction arrives without the context that would make it possible.
In Ela Lee's novel Minbak, a character asks a question that stopped me cold: how do you explain depression to a Korean who has lived through an occupation, a world war, and a civil war?
It is not rhetorical. It is a real question, and it points to something the mental health conversation rarely addresses honestly: that for cultures shaped by collective survival, the framework of individual emotional suffering can feel not just unfamiliar but illegitimate. When the generation before you endured the unendurable without naming it, without stopping, without asking anyone to accommodate their pain, what language do you reach for? What right do you claim?
This lives in cultures that had to be hard to survive: communities where resilience was not a virtue but a requirement, and softness a luxury no one could afford. It lives, with force, in many Latin American households and Caribbean families, where warmth and expressiveness are native but have always had a boundary. Joy may be loud. Pain, private and shapeless and interior, belongs behind a closed door, to be gotten over so that life can carry on.
The Specific Position of the Expressive Woman
There is a myth that emotional suppression belongs only to the quiet. That the woman who speaks freely, who fills a room, has nothing to hide.
This is wrong, and it is a costly misreading.
For many Hispanic women, expressiveness is not something that requires permission. It is native. And a significant portion of adult life can be spent being told, in various registers, that it is a problem: too much, too direct, too present. The label shifts with the room, passionate in one context, difficult in another, unprofessional in a third. The instruction underneath is always the same: less.
What you learn, when you receive that instruction often enough, is not to go quiet. You learn to curate. To decide which parts of your expressiveness are safe to show, and which parts, the uncertain ones, the frightened ones, the ones that might confirm the worst version of what people already think about you, need to be managed.
And because it still looks like expressiveness, no one thinks to ask what’s underneath. Including, sometimes, yourself.
What Hiding Costs
Research on emotional suppression points in one direction: as a long-term strategy, it tends not to work. Not because suppressed feelings always resurface dramatically, though sometimes they do, but because suppression is itself a drain. The effort of managing what you feel, curating what you show, and monitoring how you are perceived draws on resources that are then unavailable for anything else.
For the high-functioning woman, this goes unnoticed for years. By most external measures, she is fine: producing, achieving, maintaining. The cost is interior and cumulative, and it surfaces not as a breakdown but as a flattening. A narrowing of what feels possible. A growing distance between who she is in public and who she is when no one is watching.
Telling a woman who learned to hide in order to survive that she should simply stop is not a solution. It ignores everything she was taught about why hiding was necessary in the first place.
The Peace We Keep and What It Costs Us
There is a phrase familiar to women across many cultures: Don’t disturb the peace.
It arrives in different forms. Let it go. You’re too sensitive. Is it worth the argument? Sometimes it is spoken. More often it is simply in the air, the ambient pressure to manage other people’s comfort before your own truth.
The instruction is dressed as wisdom, as maturity, as the sophisticated understanding that not everything needs to be said. Sometimes that is true. But it is also, frequently, the mechanism by which women learn to treat their own interior experience as a disruption, something that inconveniences others and makes them difficult.
The woman who has absorbed this deeply doesn’t only hide from other people. She hides from herself. She becomes very skilled at not quite knowing what she feels, at converting distress into productivity, at being fine when she is not, in ways that are genuinely invisible to her.
This is where the mental health conversation needs to go deeper. Not only: are you struggling? But: have you been taught that your struggle is an imposition? Have you ever been in a room where it was safe to say you were not okay, without managing what that meant for everyone else in it?
For many women, the answer is no. And no awareness campaign changes that without also addressing what created the silence in the first place.
What Reclaiming Looks Like
It is not, in the end, about becoming louder. Many of us are already loud.
It is about the difference between being heard and being tolerated: the distance between the self you perform and the one you have not yet allowed to speak plainly.
Reclaiming your interior life doesn’t require sharing it with everyone. It requires, first, access to it yourself: knowing what you feel, not just what you have decided is acceptable to feel.
For women whose cultures have made that difficult, not out of coldness but out of survival, out of what it cost generations before them to stay intact, this is not simple work. A meditation app will not solve it, and neither will a single good conversation.
It is built slowly, through small acts of internal honesty. By noticing when you convert your truth into something more manageable. By asking, with genuine curiosity rather than accusation: what would you say if you were not trying to protect anyone from what you think?
And in part, it is made possible by finding the voices, in literature, in conversation, in rooms that don’t ask you to be less, that allow you to believe your interior life is worth the space it takes up.
For many of us, that belief is the work: to see oneself clearly, to accept not being for everyone, and to learn, slowly, that this is not a problem to solve. It is a truth to carry with some grace.
Further Reading: On Visibility, Suppression, and the Interior Life
These pieces explore what gets performed, what gets hidden, and what it takes to stop doing both.
→ On Being Witnessed Without Being Known: On the specific loneliness of a life lived in plain sight.
→ What High-Performing Women Get Wrong About Self-Criticism: The harshest voice in the room is usually your own.
→ The Discomfort We Keep Rescheduling: On what we already know—and keep postponing.