They made me believe that worth must be earned,
through obedience, through pleasing,
through silence.
But I was not born to be palatable.
I was born to pulse.
There were no celebrations when I came into form,
only warnings and whispered worries,
as if the wind could already see the future of my suffering,
as if I were already too much to be contained.
I remember…
how they looked, at, me.
as if I were a monster, an abomination,
the mistake in their story.
A line that didn’t rhyme. A door that led to an unspeakable room.
But I was never in their story.
I was the one who remembered before my true path, my true dreams.
I did not owe them a version of me they could bear.
I did not owe my softness to their healing.
Nor my light to their darkness. Nor my survival to their cruelty.
I owe myself the fullness of this breath.
This unpromised hour of being without apology.
And if I rise again and again,
it is not a gift to the world.
It is my body’s answer to a question they never had the grace to ask.
They called it strength, but it was never for them.
It was the rebellion of staying alive in a world that mistook my tenderness for something it could undo.
And still, I bloomed.
Not for them
.
.
.
Never for them.
But for the girl who once wept without knowing why.
For the whisper that curled inside me before I had words.
For the unspoken that built an entire universe within my breath.
I never owed them my rebirth.
I was never theirs to begin with.