Generally speaking, I think I’m a good communicator. My mother tells me that back in preschool — at the famous Tenshi Yōchien in Suzano-SP, a school run by Japanese Catholic nuns (yep, you read that right) —, she was frequently called into the principal's office because yours truly just wouldn’t stop talking, disrupting the other children.

I don’t remember my teenage years in great detail, other than being a typical 2000s emo who chose to cut her hair short (a mistake). But I loved writing angsty poems about unrequited love, and I would hand-copy lyrics about the pain of love into several different notebooks — the ones where the stickers were never used and the last pages always stayed blank. I also liked writing diaries, super-secret ones (not reallywhich, besides platonic heartaches, detailed my adventures in the nightlife of Mogi and the mouths that couldn't escape my whims (good times).

During college, I learned how to present in public and developed the gift of gab, speaking confidently about subjects I didn't understand all that well. In adulthood, one way or another, I was always communicating with people. I even helped found a Toastmasters club — an international public speaking organization — at one of the clinical research companies where I worked, just to practice public speaking in English with other colleagues.

I’m not entirely sure of the exact moment I started thinking that maybe communicating and connecting with people wasn't one of my best skills. But I’d bet all my money that the quarantine period magnified this. It drastically increased the time I spent in mental dialogues instead of connecting with real people. I started giving an audience to an internal security committee, which gave endless speeches about the dangers of proximity and engaging with other human beings.

Without even realizing it, I slowly began limiting my expression. I spoke less, wrote less, and had less fun as a result. Flirting? A capital crime — I felt like I could kill someone with Covid if I went around kissing people on the mouth. Over time, it became easier to file those desires away in a little box kept deep inside me. To top it off, my religious upbringing helped reinforce these blocks and stifle my skills. Compounded by the news of a global calamity, Catholic guilt joined forces with Kardecist guilt (if it wasn't the Devil, it was a legion of obsessing spirits to punish me), and the damage was done. “To talk is to engage, engaging brings proximity, proximity is not safe,”the committee in my mind decreed, and I accepted it.

But what’s the point of trying to stifle something that is a part of who you are? The pleasure of talking and expressing myself never left me; it wasn't something that could just be removed, despite so much effort in the opposite direction. However, instead of being easy and natural, it warped into a reason for shame and guilt. And what happens when we try to repress a part of ourselves? It hurts the baby. And the baby is you.

It’s like trying to hold in a fart and getting cramps. It’s the exact same thing, just inside your head. Mental farts creating the painful cramps of mental health.Trying to lock away your creative expression, whatever form it takes, is unnatural. It’s trying to cover up the most exuberant part of yourself. It’s swimming against the current. You might even make it to the other side, but you arrive exhausted.

The Diary of a Quitter is my choice to swim with the current. It’s deciding to leave that space of blindly believing my traumatized mind (pobrecita) and choosing what is actually best for me. It’s a place where I don’t listen to apocryphal, apocalyptic calculations of what “is safe and what isn't,” or to the advice of “saving myself so I don't have to live through something that will inevitably go wrong.”

I chose writing because I am taking the necessary, albeit cautious, steps toward what is natural for me. I unlearned how to trust myself, but I am willing to retake that process. Slowly, I am going to allow myself to mess up. I am going to practice writing, which is where I can put it all out there, edit, re-edit, repeat, and change it as many times as I want. And allow myself to feel pleasure in doing so.

I want to train myself to hear the most important voice to me: the one that got drowned out by the committee. I am going to listen to it with more tenderness so that, when it’s time to bring this voice out live, it doesn't come out so starved, bulldozing everything and expressing a thousand emotions all at once, like a flying champagne cork.

I would love to tell you that, as a 36-year-old woman, I’ve done enough therapy to be a super-being of emotional intelligence and nonviolent communication, and that this exploding-cork feeling no longer exists in my world. But I’d be lying.So, here I am, being way too bold (according to the committee) by authorizing this voice to come out. I am here to tell these stories that shaped some interesting personality traits, and to use this blog as a tool to stop giving so much weight to that conservative advice in my mind. I want to listen when this voice tells me that it’s okay to make mistakes, as long as I don't stop. Personally, I hope that when this voice leaves my mouth, it comes without the fear of not being able to edit it.

To you who are reading this, I hope this writing can encourage you not to silence your own creative voice. The one that whispers or screams for something different: for connection, for more lightness, for more pleasure, for a more joyful life. May this text stimulate you to not let whatever silences you speak the loudest.

It is okay to quit being silent.

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12 June 2026