Keeping Secrets

The Weight of What We Don’t Say

There’s a particular kind of pain that doesn’t come from what happens, but from what wasn’t said.

We often believe that keeping a secret is an act of love.
A way to protect, to shield or to soften the blow for someone we care about.
Sometimes, it is, but sometimes… it isn’t.

Sometimes, the silence carries more weight than the truth ever could.

I knew my mom had tremors.

It was one of those things that just existed in the background — noticeable, but never fully explained. I didn’t question it deeply. I trusted that if there was something I needed to know, I would know.

Until one day, in a conversation that wasn’t meant to change anything, it changed everything.
My aunt mentioned it casually. As if it had already been said. As if I had already been let in.

“She has Parkinson’s.”

Just like that.

No build-up, no careful conversation, no moment of being sat down and told with love and honesty. Just a sentence and the quiet realisation that everyone else already knew.
In that moment, the hurt wasn’t just about the diagnosis. It was about the distance. 
The kind you don’t see until you’re already standing inside it.

The unspoken gap between me and something so deeply personal.
The feeling that a part of my mom’s life — a hard, heavy part — had been happening without me. Not because I didn’t care, but because I wasn’t told.

Then, almost just as quickly as the hurt came, so did the guilt.

I started replaying everything in my mind — every moment I noticed the tremors, but didn’t ask more. Every time I brushed it off as something small, something manageable, something that didn’t need deeper attention.

How did I not see it?
How did I not question it?
How did I let it become something so normal that I stopped being curious about it at all?

There’s a quiet kind of self-blame that creeps in when you realise maybe the signs were always there and you convinced yourself they weren’t serious. That maybe, if you had asked more questions, leaned in a little closer, you wouldn’t be finding out like this.

I remember there were moments — many of them — where I had begged my mom for us to go see a doctor about her tremors. I noticed them. I worried about them. I didn’t understand them. However, every time I brought it up, she brushed it off. Dismissed it gently, firmly, like it wasn’t something to look at too closely and eventually… I stopped asking. Not because I stopped caring, but because I learned that pushing the conversation didn’t change the outcome.

I also now understand something that I didn’t fully have words for at the time — my mom had polio as a child, and I used to believe (and was also led to understand) that her tremors, pain and slower movement might be post-polio syndrome. In my mind, that explanation made sense of what I was seeing, so I didn’t look beyond it or question further, because it already felt like there was an answer for her symptoms.

Then another layer revealed itself — one that softened the edges of everything I was feeling.

My mom didn’t tell me… not because she didn’t trust me or didn’t want me to know, but because I’ve been fighting my own battles — living with my own chronic illness and carrying my own weight.

Maybe, in her own way, this was her trying to protect me.
To not add more to what I was already carrying and to spare me from another worry, another heaviness.

Somehow, that realisation holds both comfort and heartbreak at the same time.

With that understanding, I’ve also found a kind of grace I didn’t expect. It must feel incredibly degrading at times — to notice your own body changing in ways you can’t fully control. Parkinson’s is not just tremors. It include symptoms like slowed movement, muscle stiffness, balance issues, reduced facial expression, softer speech, fatigue, difficulty with fine motor tasks like writing or buttoning clothes and sometimes even trouble walking as the body becomes more rigid over time. You start dropping things more often, moving more slowly or feeling like their body is no longer responding the way it used to and beyond the physical changes, there are emotional symptoms too — anxiety, depression and a deep sense of frustration or loss as independence slowly shifts. Looking at it through this lens, so much of my mom’s behaviour now makes sense in a way I hadn’t understood before — not as distance, but as someone quietly adapting to something incredibly heavy.

I understand why people keep things like this.

Illness is heavy. It changes the way people look at you.
It invites worry, questions, fear — sometimes more than you feel ready to carry.

So we protect the people we love.

We say, “I don’t want to burden them.”
We say, “I’ll tell them when the time is right.”
We say, “It’s easier this way.”

But what we don’t always realise is this:

Being left out doesn’t feel like protection. It feels like disconnection, because love doesn’t just show up in the easy moments. It shows up in the hard conversations, in the uncomfortable truths and in quietly sitting together with something that doesn’t have a solution. 

When we’re not given the chance to be part of that — to show up, to support, to simply know — it can feel like we’ve been gently pushed to the outside and that hurts in a different way, a deeper way.

Finding out about my mom’s Parkinson’s didn’t just bring concern for her. It brought questions I didn’t know how to ask.

How long has this been going on?
How has she been coping?
Why didn’t she tell me?

The hardest one of all: Did she think I couldn’t handle it?

However, with time, I’ve come to understand something important.
Secrets like these are rarely kept out of exclusion.

They’re kept out of love, out of fear, out of not knowing how to say something that changes everything and while that doesn’t erase the hurt — it softens it, because maybe the truth is this:

There is no perfect way to share hard things. There is no perfect way to receive them either.
If anything, this experience has taught me the value of honesty — even when it’s uncomfortable. Especially when it’s uncomfortable, because the people who love you don’t need perfection. They don’t need you to have all the answers. They just need to be let in.

So if you’re holding something heavy, thinking you’re protecting someone by staying silent…

Maybe ask yourself:

Are you protecting them — or are you protecting yourself from the difficulty of the conversation?

If you’re on the other side, like I was…

It’s okay to feel hurt. It’s okay to feel left out. It’s okay to take time to process what you’ve learned, but it’s also okay to lean back in and to choose understanding, because at the end of the day, love isn’t about shielding each other from reality.

It’s about facing it together — even when it’s hard.

With you on the journey,
– Storm Reagan
Life Coach | Lived Experience Guide