Episode 2 – Growing Up in Fear

After that night, everything looked normal.

But nothing felt normal.

My father still came home late.

Sometimes drunk.

Sometimes pretending nothing had ever happened.

And I… I started changing.

I was still a child.

But I wasn’t carefree anymore.

At school, I was quiet.

Too quiet.

It wasn’t that I didn’t want to talk.

I just couldn’t.

Words would get stuck in my throat.

Even saying something simple felt difficult.

I was scared of people.

Scared of speaking.

Scared of being noticed.

Sometimes I was afraid to even move in my seat.

If I slightly turned my head, I felt like everyone was watching me.

Like if I made the smallest movement, someone would judge me.

So I stayed still.

I kept my head down.

I avoided eye contact.

I made myself small.

Other boys laughed loudly, pushed each other, ran across the classroom without fear.

I didn’t understand how they could be so free.

I was always tense.

I didn’t have many friends.

Actually… I didn’t really have any.

There was one girl I became friends with in first grade.

We went to the same tuition as well.

But even with her, we were never very close.

At tuition, we barely talked.

At school, we spoke sometimes — but not deeply.

Even with the only person I could call a “friend,” there was distance.

Because the real problem wasn’t others.

It was me.

Or at least… that’s what I believed.

I was afraid to start conversations.

Afraid to say the wrong thing.

Afraid that people would laugh.

So I stayed quiet.

Day after day.

Teachers would say,

“Ash is very calm.”

“Ash is very mature.”

They didn’t know I wasn’t calm.

I was scared.

Scared of loud voices.

Scared of attention.

Scared of doing something wrong.

I had learned at home that silence keeps you safe.

So I carried that silence everywhere.

Even to school.

I was only a child.

But my mind was already tired.

Sometimes I would come home from school and replay the entire day in my head.

Every small movement.

Every word I didn’t say.

Every moment I thought someone might be judging me.

“Did I look weird?”

“Did I sit properly?”

“Did someone laugh at me?”

Even when nobody said anything, my mind created fears of its own.

At home, I had learned to stay alert.

At school, I stayed alert too.

I was always observing. Always careful. Always prepared for something to go wrong.

I envied the kids who could just exist without thinking so much.

The ones who didn’t calculate every action.

I wanted to be like them.

But wanting and becoming are two different things.

There were days I would promise myself,

“Tomorrow, I’ll talk more.”

“Tomorrow, I won’t be scared.”

But when tomorrow came, my body would freeze again.

Fear isn’t always loud.

Sometimes it’s silent.

Sometimes it looks like a quiet boy sitting in the third row, staring at his desk.

And no one notices.

I started believing that maybe this was just who I was meant to be — the quiet one, the background character in everyone else’s story.

But deep down, I knew something wasn’t right.

Because even though I was silent… my mind was never quiet.

It was full of thoughts.

Full of worries.

Full of “what ifs.”

I didn’t know the word for it back then.

I didn’t know about anxiety.

I didn’t know about trauma.

I just knew that I was tired.

Tired of being scared.

Tired of feeling different.

Tired of pretending I was okay.

But even in that tiredness, something inside me refused to give up.

Maybe I was quiet.

Maybe I was afraid.

But I was still standing.

And sometimes, standing through fear is braver than shouting through confidence.

I didn’t have many friends.

I didn’t have loud laughter.

But I had endurance.

And endurance, I would later learn, turns into strength.

This phase of my life didn’t break me.

It shaped me.

And even though I didn’t know it yet…

The quiet boy sitting alone would one day find his voice.

And when he did,

it would be stronger than all the fear he grew up with

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