I grew up a woman with a father-shaped shadow draped over my shoulders, a weight I carried from room to room, year to year. My father was supposed to be my first shelter, a map to the world. Instead, he became my lesson in survival. I learned early that to make it, I’d have to mimic him, study him, learn his moods, his darkness, and his lies. I had to know his cruelty, taste it, feel its weight in my mouth—because knowing it was the only way to survive it.
I became his mirror, learned to sharpen my edges, wear his same armor. I taught myself how to look through people the way he looked through me, as if they were glass. I trained myself to predict every betrayal, to expect every disappointment, to hide pieces of myself where he couldn’t reach. In some twisted way, becoming him felt safer than fighting him. You don’t survive a fire by running—you learn its language, you watch how it eats, you understand its heat, until you are the only one left standing.
So I spent years, a stranger to myself, choked by a language that wasn’t my own, learning to wear his darkness like skin. And yet, somehow, somewhere deep inside, I knew there was still something else—a part of me he hadn’t claimed. I knew I’d have to become someone new, someone beyond him, someone beyond even myself, to finally be free.
And this, perhaps, is the curse and the gift. To be the woman who becomes herself by losing herself first. To be forced to know evil so you can break free of it. To gather up what’s left after the wreckage, to hold yourself close, to promise you’ll never go back to that dark, hungry place. To rebuild, knowing you are both the architect and the survivor, and that in this world, you will be your own first shelter, your own first love.
B 🤍
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