Becoming Me Again
For years, I was the silence,
the shrinking shadow in the corner,
the echo of a voice never meant to rise.
He took my name and wore it down,
shaped it into something weak,
something breakable,
something afraid to exist too loudly.
I learned to disappear in plain sight,
to make myself small enough
that maybe he wouldn’t see me,
small enough that maybe the storm would pass
without striking me down.
But no matter how much I bent,
he still found ways to break me.
He told me who I was—
worthless, fragile, nothing without his say.
And for too long, I believed him.
I carried his words like weights on my back,
let them sink into my bones
until I couldn’t tell where he ended and I began.
But pain is not identity.
Fear is not a home.
And I refuse to be a monument
to the worst parts of him.
So I began to rebuild.
At first, it was slow, unsteady,
like learning to walk again after years of crawling.
I spoke my name out loud
and let it feel like mine.
I looked in the mirror
and tried to see a person instead of a wound.
I unlearned the fear of footsteps,
the instinct to flinch at loud voices,
the lie that love always comes with pain.
Piece by piece, I stitched myself back together,
not as who he told me I was,
but as someone he never had the power to shape.
I found myself in the spaces he could never reach—
in the quiet where I make my own peace,
in the laughter that no longer hides,
in the strength of my own steady hands,
in the mirror where I see not fear, but fire.
His words do not bind me.
His anger does not own me.
I am not the scars,
not the bruises,
not the child who flinched at every footstep.
I am something new,
something whole,
something he will never understand—
free.
And that is mine.
That is me.
That is everything he tried to take,
and everything he failed to destroy.
I am still here.
I have risen from the wreckage,
not untouched, not unscarred,
but undefeated.
And I am not afraid anymore.
