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Beneath My Silence – The People We Can Never Return To

There is a quiet kind of grief few people speak about. It arrives the moment you sit across from someone you once loved dearly and realize the person you remember no longer lives there.

Their face is familiar. Their voice is the same. But something essential has quietly changed. You search for the laughter you once knew, the ease you once shared, the feeling of coming home in their presence. Instead, you meet a stranger wearing a familiar name. Time has a way of changing us all. We shed old dreams, old fears, old versions of ourselves.

Sometimes we grow together.

Sometimes we grow apart. And perhaps that is one of life’s gentlest heartbreaks ~

understanding that you will […]

By Doré Frances|2026-07-26T12:09:35-06:00July 26th, 2026|Beneath My Silence - Poems, Why Wisdom Is Harder Than You Think|0 Comments

The Girl Left Behind – The First Adult Who Saw Me

By the time I climbed into my parents’ station wagon, I had been trying to run away for nearly a year. I hadn’t volunteered to go to Stanford.

Dotti told me we were going to a doctor’s appointment. Instead, she drove me to a psychiatric evaluation program in Palo Alto, about eleven miles from our home. As we walked inside, I was greeted by women in uniforms carrying clipboards. Then Dotti quietly slipped away. I can still picture her from behind. Her tall, elegant posture and silver hair disappearing through the doorway.

I didn’t know it then, but she had convinced my father that I was mentally ill, an “out-of-control” teenager who belonged in an institution.

In some ways, […]

Beneath My Silence – The Heart That Chose Kindness

It is one of life’s quieter sorrows ~

discovering that being kind does not guarantee kindness in return. You can offer your best, show up with an open heart, love without keeping score, and still be met with silence, distance, or disappointment. That does not mean your kindness was misplaced. It simply means not every heart has learned to love in the same way.

Do not let another person’s choices convince you to become someone you were never meant to be.

Let their actions belong to them. Let your compassion belong to you. The world needs more hearts that choose goodness without demanding reward, more souls that remain gentle even after being wounded.

So keep choosing kindness ~

not […]

By Doré Frances|2026-07-26T12:09:26-06:00July 16th, 2026|Beneath My Silence - Poems, Why Wisdom Is Harder Than You Think|0 Comments

Whispers To The Soul –The Simplicity of Being True

Let me confess something. As I stumble along my own path, I find that I must learn the same lessons over and over again ~

not because I have failed, but because each return reveals a deeper truth.

Learning no longer feels like moving in a straight line. It feels more like ascending a spiral staircase. With every turn, I revisit familiar places, yet I see them from a higher vantage point.

Each step draws me deeper into the life of my soul.

What does this teach me?

In a complicated world, we are often led to believe that living simply is naïve.

Yet I have come to see that simplicity […]

By Doré Frances|2026-07-26T12:13:32-06:00July 9th, 2026|Collections, Spirituality, Whispers To The Soul, Why Wisdom Is Harder Than You Think|0 Comments

Beneath My Silence – The Grace to Become

Over the years, I’ve learned not to keep people imprisoned by who they once were. We all have versions of ourselves that no longer belong to us ~

choices we regret, lessons we had yet to learn, and seasons when our own wounds shaped the way we moved through the world.

It’s easy to remember someone by their hardest chapter. Much harder to notice the quiet work they’ve done since. But people are not meant to remain the same. Life has a way of humbling us, refining us, and inviting us to become more compassionate than we once were. I’ve watched hearts soften. I’ve seen restless souls find peace. I’ve witnessed people who once […]

By Doré Frances|2026-07-26T12:09:20-06:00July 9th, 2026|Beneath My Silence - Poems, Why Wisdom Is Harder Than You Think|0 Comments

Notes from George: The Search for Peace and Purpose

For George, serenity was never especially appealing. Peace of mind seemed, to him, a little too quiet. He wanted to grab life by the horns. He wanted to leap with joy, grieve deeply, and fight for what mattered.

Yet something inside him was always searching.

By his early twenties, the weight of our childhood had begun to catch up with him. The intensity we had lived through left both of us feeling untethered. We didn’t know how to live with peace because we had never known it. We felt disconnected from the world and uncertain about where we belonged. George wasn’t interested in therapy. His inner world remained restless, and his thoughts rarely […]

By Doré Frances|2026-07-26T12:13:39-06:00July 3rd, 2026|Collections, Notes From George Collections, Why Wisdom Is Harder Than You Think|0 Comments

Beneath My Silence – Between Two Worlds

Some days, it feels as though I exist between two worlds.

There is the person everyone sees ~

calm, capable, smiling at the right moments, moving through each day as though nothing has changed.

I answer questions, keep my commitments, and wear composure so naturally that few would ever think to look beyond it. Then there is the quieter life I carry within. A place where sorrow settles gently into my bones, where thoughts remain unspoken, and emotions are too deep for ordinary conversation. There are wounds no one can see, questions I cannot answer, and an ache that follows me even into moments that should feel light.

Living […]

By Doré Frances|2026-07-26T12:09:12-06:00July 3rd, 2026|Beneath My Silence - Poems, Why Wisdom Is Harder Than You Think|0 Comments

Beneath My Silence: A Poem About Missing Someone in Silence

Missing someone you cannot speak of is its own kind of silence. Not because the feeling isn’t real ~ but because it isn’t something the world would understand. So you carry it inward, like something sacred. No messages. No reaching out. No words to give it form.

Only the quiet dialogue that never leaves your heart. They return in subtle ways—
in a passing breeze, in dreams that linger, in the stillness of moments no one else notices.

You don’t miss them out loud. You miss them in the spaces between ~ between what is spoken and what remains unspoken.

And somehow, it is in that silence that they continue to exist.

By Doré Frances|2026-07-26T12:09:06-06:00March 23rd, 2026|Beneath My Silence - Poems, Why Wisdom Is Harder Than You Think|0 Comments