The Stories We Hold: Transforming Pain Into Purpose.
Your unspoken story isn’t your weakness, it’s the doorway to your power. When you learn to face it, you stop surviving and begin living.
What we don’t share begins as a faint smoke inside the body, a whisper of ache. Ignore it long enough, and it becomes a stone lodged in the heart. This is the story of how I learned to transmute that stone into strength. What we don’t speak accumulates quietly.
It begins as a thin, dark smoke curling beneath the ribs barely perceptible, almost shy. But unexpressed pain doesn’t stay gentle. It loops in the mind, circling the same memories, the same scenes, the same unanswered questions… until it condenses into something dense and heavy. A stone. A stone with a pulse. A story. A story wrapped in shame. A story wrapped in longing. A story we fear releasing because… Who will we become without it?
Sometimes, without realizing it, we treat our pain as an alibi, an excuse to stay small, safe, unseen. Because the moment we let it go, we’d have no choice but to rise.
And rising requires courage. Years ago, I asked myself a question that cracked something open in me:
“Is this memory exactly how it happened… or is it how I retold it in order to survive?”
We rarely revisit our stories with the eyes we have today. We recall them from the level of consciousness we held when they broke us. And we keep replaying them, adding details to explain the ache, to justify the wound, to make sense of our pain.
But what if we told the truth, not the emotional truth, but the higher truth?
What if the story wasn’t meant to imprison you… but awaken you?
Let me bring you into a memory, the one I couldn’t speak for years.
There was a time I hated my childhood narrative. I used to drift into fantasies, imagining a different life: If only I had been raised by my real mother… If only love had been soft, warm, present… If only my childhood held joy instead of silence and tears…
My father, God bless him, did everything he could. White shoes, pressed slacks, early mornings, long days. He carried the world so his five children didn’t have to.
So who was I to question the silence around my mother? When I dared ask, he said: “Why look for what isn’t here, Joanne? I’m doing everything for you.”
So I swallowed the ache. I buried the questions. I became the good daughter, the achiever, the one who needed nothing.
But adolescence has a way of exposing the cracks. It was then I discovered: I receive love through physical touch. And our home did not speak that language.
I slept craving a mother’s kiss on the cheek. A gentle hand brushing my hair. A soft, “goodnight, anak.”
Instead, I slept in terror. My stepmother and I were not in harmony back then. Today I see the truth clearly: I was a child longing for a mother’s love… and she was a woman caring for a child who reminded her of a wound she did not choose.
One day she said: “Wala akong amor sa’yo, Joanne.” I don’t have love for you.
Those words pierced through the bone.
That was my past. Not my present.
Today, we are at peace. She held my arm at lunch recently, asking about my love life. She softened. I softened. Life softened.
She helped raise me. She shaped me. She made me strong. And I honor her.
I grew up learning to carry pain quietly. To endure without breaking. To be strong even when I felt dead inside. Time didn’t heal me. Time doesn’t heal what we bury.
My pain visited me in the middle of the night heavy, suffocating, pressing on my chest like a block of cement. I tried everything to escape it dating, shopping, overworking, yet it remained. Because what we resist… persists.
Many nights, I drove through empty streets at 2:00 a.m., streetlights flickering across my windshield, tears rolling silently.
Why won’t this go away? It’s in the past. I want to live forward. And so I whispered to the sky: “God, angels, Universe, please. Help me.”
What we don’t share becomes our blockage not as punishment, but as initiation.
The wound holds the code. Your story holds the blueprint. Your pain holds the portal. When we turn inward, when we finally listen, we discover:
Our story was never meant to destroy us. It was always meant to awaken us. It’s the compass of our becoming.
If your heart is whispering that it’s time… trust that.
Book a private 1:1 call with me and let’s explore what’s been weighing you down and who you’re becoming beyond it.
If you’re ready for a deeper, longer transformation, you can apply for my 3-month, 6-month, or one-year private mentorship container, a space where we walk side by side as you rise into the woman or man you were meant to be.
Email me to apply. genozajoanne@gmail.com
Your next chapter is one decision away.
If this message stirred something in you… Then it will be in high service to you to read this next post:
“Your Bold Yes Will Change Everything.”
Joanne Genoza
Joanne Genoza
