Here, in the cold light, I am flesh and bone, bruised from the inside out, but still standing. I find myself tracing back, not the soft lullabies or the steady hands of protection, but the roughness of touch that was never meant to be mine.
They told me to keep quiet, that I should pretend not to notice. “It’s just a secret,” they said, but secrets grow claws. They live under the skin and tear at you from the inside until you’re hollowed, emptied of anything that once resembled love or trust.
What does it mean to be human, when the hands that should cradle you become the ones that hold you down? When your own father is the one who steals the very essence of you, rips the wings before they can even form?
Powerlessness becomes a second skin. You learn to wear it, to bend under its weight. You swallow your voice whole, day after day, until you no longer recognize it, no longer recognize yourself.
I looked for myself in mirrors, in men, in places where I could disappear. But I was always running into that same face—his face—and I couldn’t escape. Fathers are supposed to be gods, aren’t they? But mine was the one who showed me what hell looks like. And after that, how do you even begin to know yourself? How do you claw your way out of the pit someone else dug for you?
There is no map for this kind of journey. I bled my way through the dark, fumbling to find the parts of me that were still intact. Sometimes, I wonder if the girl I once was even existed, or if she was just a ghost from the start. But in this mess, this carnage of what it means to survive, I realized that being human is more than just enduring—it is naming the pain, laying it bare in the light, no matter how ugly or misshapen it is.
I know now that powerlessness wasn’t the end of me. It was the beginning of something fierce, something that could look at the broken pieces and say, “I am still here.” Yes, my father was a thief, but he didn’t take everything. And I refuse to let the silence he fed me be my voice.
This is what it means to be human after the fall. To stand with the weight of it all and say, “I’m not done yet.”
B🤍
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