Trauma needs ventilation

 When we do not share our painful stories, they begin to take up space inside us, forcing us to cross their paths, like cemetery ghosts, even when we least expect to see or recall them. Our stories, bottled up with dirt and buried, grow larger, form little mausoleums around them, and then begin to sprawl and roam inside us. We begin to live with a palatial necropolis of the past in us, where such silent stories live without living. The stories occupy more of our plots until we open up and let them out, yet even then, a piece of their trauma remains, clinging, as it may always, to us. Trauma needs ventilation, even when we think we are doing fine by bottling it all up. A heart we don’t air out becomes filled with our ghosts, until we have no more room in us to put them, and we begin to fail and fall under all that invisible, silently howling pressure.

source https://lithub.com/on-marjane-satrapis-early-metoo-novel/