THE ROOM - by Ema's Seal

There is a room.Not a place you can enter with keys or doors, but one you inherit the moment you realize you are human.Inside it sit emotions and feelings—anger, fear, pain, sadness, happiness, shame, jealousy, love, and others that rarely speak. They sit in a circle, summoned for a meeting. Something is wrong. Something has been wrong for a long time.Now, this is not the " Inside Out " story you’ve already seen.This goes deeper than color-coded feelings and tidy resolutions.It began the day she realized she could feel.That discovery should have been harmless. Ordinary.But for Emily, it was dangerous.She learned early that feelings were inconvenient—too loud, too messy, too much. So she did what survival taught her to do.She kept them.Pain.Anger.Fear.Happiness.Sadness.Shame.Jealousy.She folded them inward and pressed them beneath her chest, stacking emotion upon emotion until breathing itself became an effort.What grew there was not visible to the eye—a tumor no scan could detect, no surgeon could remove. Emily walked through life with a bullet lodged in her chest and never went in for treatment.To the outside world (us), she was just strange.Awkward.Difficult.That explained the sudden lash-outs.The tantrums.The way she avoided closeness yet picked fights like she needed proof she still existed.Outside the room, we all whispered excuses.“It’s our first time being human too.”“She didn’t need to hold on so tightly.”“Feelings don’t last forever.”“No one hurts forever.”But in the room Pain argued.“She was a troubled child,” Pain said quietly. “And I stayed.”“I stayed when no one else did. I stayed when silence became her language. I stayed because she wouldn't let me go. I was all she could feel.”Anger exploded.“It’s your fault she’s gone! She clung to you so she wouldn’t fall apart. You made her weak.”Pain did not flinch.“At least I stayed,” Pain replied. “What did you do? You pushed her toward danger. You made her bleed just to feel alive. And every time you lost control, you dragged me in to clean the mess. Don’t blame me for surviving her.”The room collapsed into noise.This meeting was taking place inside Emily’s unconscious body—because only there did she ever know peace.Peace sat at the head of the circle.“When,” Peace asked softly, “did any of you step forward so Pain wouldn’t have to carry her alone?”Silence.Then Happiness spoke.“I was present in her childhood. Before she learned restraint.”Fear followed.“I lived in her home. I taught her caution.”Sadness looked away.“After her teenage years, she buried me.”Shame barely raised its head.“I arrived when she learned her body could be traded for affection.”Jealousy shrugged.“I only surfaced around her friends.”Love stood last.“She never felt me.”A pause.“I failed her. I was absent.”<img alt="" src="/media/inline_insight_image/1000348433.jpg" style="background-color: transparent;"/>Emily was not born broken.She was shaped—slowly, quietly—by what no one asked and what everyone ignored.We called her awkward.We called her weird.We never asked why.The truth surfaced only when it was almost too late—when she tried to leave this world and instead fell into a coma.Her emotions wandered the room, confused, searching for answers they should have asked sooner.Emily is not rare.She is many of us.We may never fully understand what broke her or when the fracture began, but this much is certain: she felt devastatingly alone.So this is a reminder.Check on the quiet ones.The ones who smiles too hard.The ones who causes scenes no one wants to deal with.Pain does not always look like pain.Sometimes it looks like anger.Sometimes like laughter.Sometimes like silence.But if we learn to look closer—to listen longer—we won’t miss it.

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