Soul Version of Yourself — She’s Been Waiting to Be Heard
REINVENTING SELF · THE REBUILDING SEASON
Soul Version of Yourself — She's Been Waiting to Be Heard
She didn’t disappear. She went quiet. And it took a heartbreak, a hard season, and finally being alone with myself to hear her clearly for the first time.
The soul version of yourself doesn’t disappear. She goes quiet. She went quiet in me for years — and she showed up again around December of last year, in the middle of a heartbreak I wasn’t sure I was going to get through. In the middle of a heartbreak I wasn’t sure I was going to get through. In the silence that followed when everything I had been holding onto — a relationship, a version of myself built around other people’s comfort, a set of connections I had maintained out of loyalty rather than love — finally fell away at the same time.
I didn’t go looking for her. She arrived because there was finally nothing left to hide behind.
That’s how it works, I think. The soul version of you doesn’t disappear. She waits. She waits through the relationships where you make yourself smaller to be more lovable. She waits through the family dynamics where you hold your tongue to keep the peace. She waits through the friendships where you show up consistently for people who go quiet the moment you need something back. She waits through all of it — patient and a little impatient — until the moment arrives when you are finally alone enough and honest enough to hear her.
For me that moment arrived in the hardest season I had been through in years. And instead of filling the silence the way I always had before — with busyness, with other people’s needs, with the performance of being okay — I sat in it. And I listened.
What she had been trying to tell me
The first thing she said — not in words, in the way the body knows things before the mind catches up — was that I had been abandoning her for a very long time. Not all at once. In small, daily, almost invisible ways.
Every time I upheld a relationship with a family member who spoke about me behind my back — while being told to be the bigger person and let it go — I left her behind. Every time I maintained a friendship out of loyalty while the other person never once made room for what I was carrying — I left her behind. Every time a relationship resurfaced after months of silence with the offer of being chosen — and I felt nothing genuine toward them but questioned whether my numbness was the problem — I left her behind.
Every time someone told me I was too emotional, too sensitive, too much — and I believed them enough to turn myself down — I left her behind.
The heartbreak cracked something open that needed to be cracked open. Not because the relationship was right and the ending was wrong — but because in the aftermath, with the silence and the grief and the absence of distraction, I could finally see the full pattern of my life clearly. The way I had absorbed other people’s insecurities as information about my own worth. The way I had placed myself last so consistently that it had stopped feeling like a choice and started feeling like the natural order of things.
During the hardest weeks — when I needed people the most — the silence was extraordinary. The friends I had shown up for. The family I had kept peace with. The relationships I had maintained through sheer loyalty and effort. When I needed them back, I heard crickets.
That silence was the most clarifying thing that has ever happened to me.
The Two Versions — Your Outer Self and Your Soul Version
I think most of us live almost entirely in our outer version. The one assembled from other people’s expectations, shaped by what we learned would keep us safe and loved and accepted. The one that holds its tongue at family dinners. The one that makes itself agreeable. The one that has learned, through years of evidence, that the full version of itself is too much for most rooms.
And then there is the soul version. The one underneath all of that. The one who knows things. Who feels things accurately and deeply and without apology. Who has desires and boundaries and a specific sense of justice that doesn’t negotiate easily. Who wants to be taken care of sometimes — not as weakness, but as the basic human reciprocity that was never modeled and rarely offered.
In church they say die to thyself. I used to understand that as a call to diminish — to want less, need less, be less. I understand it differently now. I think dying to thyself means letting the outer constructed version — the one built from fear and people-pleasing and inherited survival — stop running the show. Not killing the self. Releasing the false version of it. The one that was never really you to begin with.
It isn’t you that needs to die. It’s the life you built around the version of yourself that was trying to be acceptable rather than real.
The soul version of me is the one who was always called dramatic. Too emotional. Too intense. Too much.
She is the one who feels injustice in her body before she can name it in words. Who wants love that actually sees her — not the curated manageable version but the full one — and refused to stop wanting that even after being told it was fantasy. Who has been loyal beyond reason to people who were never loyal back. Who carried her mother’s load and her father’s silence and her children’s futures and her own grief simultaneously — and called it strength when some of it was simply the absence of any other option.
She is also the one sitting here writing this. Still figuring it out. Still in the process of coming out of hiding. Still learning what it feels like to take up her full amount of space without apologizing for it.
If you recognize the woman I’m describing — not just in me but in yourself — the free HerAfter guide walks through exactly how this starts and what it takes to come back. Get Don’t Leave Yourself Behind →
What coming out of hiding actually requires
It requires sitting with the crickets. The silence where the people you expected to show up simply don’t. And resisting the urge to interpret their absence as evidence that you asked for too much — rather than evidence that certain connections were never as reciprocal as you believed.
It requires looking at every relationship in your life — family, friendship, romantic — and asking honestly: does this person make room for the real version of me? Or only the manageable one?
It requires grieving the relationships you maintained through sheer effort and loyalty that turned out to be one-directional. Not with bitterness — with clarity. What they were and what they weren’t.
It requires — and this is the hardest one — stopping the justification. The explaining yourself to people who already know you. The rehearsing of your hardships to earn understanding from people who will never fully give it. The energy spent reasoning with those who are not yet ready to see you clearly.
And it requires — slowly, imperfectly, on the days when you have energy for it — choosing the soul version over the outer version. One small decision at a time. Saying the true thing instead of the safe thing. Letting the friendship end that was costing more than it gave. Stopping the appeasement of the family dynamic that was built around your silence.
Not all at once. Not dramatically. But consistently. Until the outer version starts to feel less like home and the soul version starts to feel less like a stranger.
She has been waiting a long time. She deserves the effort.
I am writing this from inside the process — nine months into the hardest and most clarifying season of my life. I don’t have it fully figured out. But I can feel the difference between the woman who was living almost entirely in her outer version and the one who is slowly learning to let the soul version speak.
That difference is worth everything it has cost to get here.
When did you first hear her — the soul version of you? Not when did she disappear. When did you first feel her trying to come back? I want to know. Leave it in the comments or reply to this post. I read every single one.
And if this found someone who needed it today — you don’t have to explain why you’re sharing it. Sometimes that’s enough.