Self, Unlearned.

I spent years becoming someone I thought I had to be:

louder, 

harder, 

less breakable.

Someone who could survive anything by feeling nothing.

It worked. until it didn’t.

Because numbness is not strength—it is absence.

And absence cannot sustain a life. So I started unlearning—

the anger I mistook for identity,

the control I mistook for safety,

the detachment I mistook for peace. It was not graceful. 

It was not immediate.

It was not easy to sit with a version of myself I had spent years avoiding. But beneath all that noise, there was something else—

quieter, 

steadier, 

unafraid of being known. 

And for the first time,

I did not run from it. 

I stayed, 

and that was the beginning of everything.