She was Never the Problem

They told her she wasn’t

~ not enough of what, they never said ~
just a feeling she wore like a second skin,
tight, itching, impossible to shed.
So she made herself smaller.
Not because she was small…Never that!
But because the people who were supposed to protect her taught her that shrinking was the price of staying safe.
They loved her in ways that left marks.
Words that didn’t bruise where anyone could see.
Hands and hearts that took what was never theirs to take.
And she learned early that love could be a room with no exits.
So she built her own walls.
Became cold.
Precise.
A girl who moved like she had already calculated every way you could hurt her and decided: not today.
Not today…Not again…Not ever!
The black sheep learned to leap higher than the flock.
Rose clean above the noise, but it still echoed around her!
Above the hands that tried to hold her down. Yet she could still feel the force!
She got to the top.
And still…she could not find herself up there.
Because armor is not the same as wholeness. Because a girl who had to raise herself
after she lost her mom doesn’t just lose a parent…
she loses the person who was supposed to show her who she was.
And that grief doesn’t have one face.
It has layers.
Grief for her mom.
Grief for the little girl who needed someone to stay.
Grief for the years she spent performing.
Set on an autopilot strength because falling apart wasn’t something anybody had time for.
Grief for the self she kept searching for in every room,
every relationship, every title, every win…is this it? Is this where I find me?
The abuse deepened the wound.
The loss widened it.
And somewhere in between surviving all she’s been through…she misplaced herself not dramatically, not all at once…
but quietly,
the way a woman does when she spends too long being everything for everyone and nothing for herself.
She is not lost.
But she is still learning what it means to be found.
Still unfolding.

Still surrendering the parts of her that tried to outrun the pain.
Still sitting in the rawness of it…because healing isn’t a clean line, it’s a daily returning to the girl she had to leave behind and telling her:
I see you now.
I’m sorry it took so long.