Jagged

 No one talks about how painful it is to wake up. Not in the morning, but in your bones. To finally breathe through the stories you were told to bury, the stories that “weren’t that bad.” To name the things that shut your heart off. The things that killed pieces of your soul, or to sit with grief praying that it will eventually loosen its grip.

They say healing should be soft, but my healing is jagged, with sharp edges. It stings where I stitched myself shut, where I told myself I would never speak of my pain. It burns when I think of how I swallowed my own voice, to protect others, to keep their name clean while destroying me. It ached when I felt so alone, like I was carrying a secret, a burden, that was dragging me down, sucking the life out of me, and stealing my peace.

The hardest part is not from the wounds, but the whispers in my mind, telling me I’m weak for still hurting. For still carrying what was never mine to carry. I sometimes forget that healing is not a straight line; it’s a messy knot of sorrow and growth. It’s realizing that the silence I kept for so long was never for them. It was for me, to protect myself from being seen as broken.

But I am broken. And that’s okay. In the brokenness, there is space for me to rebuild, to reclaim the parts of me I thought were lost. The jagged edges will soften, but they will never go away. And maybe, that’s where the strength lies: not in the perfection of the healing, or in being strong, but in the courage to face the pain and rise anyway. Because broken doesn’t mean finished; it means I’m still here, still learning, still finding pieces of me in the rubble, still fighting.