Write Anyway. Burn Anyway. Return Anyway.

There are silences that bruise louder than screams.

Not the quiet of surrender, but the hush that arrives after your mouth has been stitched shut too many times. After you've asked softly, bravely, with all the decency you were taught, and still been told:
wait your turn.
stay in your place.
be less than the ache you carry.

I think we are taught to fear becoming too much.
But the truth is: too muchness is often a map.
It leads to the version of you that could no longer bear betrayal by your own voice.

Because when a woman is stripped of the soft futures she was promised, something else begins to grow. Something wilder. She doesn’t rise like a phoenix. She builds herself from the ash, and she doesn’t apologise for the smoke.

We speak of transformation as if it’s beautiful.
But sometimes it means crawling on your elbows through the scorched marrow of your own memory.
Sometimes it means holding your breath as the past peels itself off your skin. One apology, one sacrifice, one vanished dream at a time.

That’s what it was for me.

Not a breakthrough. A remembering.
Of the girl who used to write stories beneath her grandmother’s table.
Of the woman who once believed in vows, in loyalty, in home...until those words became echo chambers for grief.
Of the writer who waited. And waited. And waited.
Until the waiting became its own kind of exile.

I no longer apologise for the voice that rose when the world expected me to whisper.
I no longer ask permission to burn.

The work I write now…
It does not play nice.
It is not small.
It grieves in metaphor.
It disobeys the genre boxes built to hold it still.

It is about women who do not go quietly, even when every mechanism around them is designed to ensure their disappearance.
It is about reclamation, not revenge.
Intimacy, not spectacle.
And it is rooted in the pulse of every woman who ever had to build her own sanctuary because the world refused her one.

If I sound dramatic, good.
They’ve called women that for centuries when we get too close to truth.

But I am no longer writing to be palatable.
I am writing to be felt.
By the right reader.
By the one who doesn’t flinch when something sacred howls through the sentence.

So here I am.

A woman with no mask left, writing from the wound, from the threshold, from the place where silence broke and something holy began to speak.

For those who’ve ever been told they were too late.

Too much.
Too loud.
Too sentimental.
Too angry.
Too strange.

I was never any of those things.
I was just on time for the life they said I couldn’t have.

There are years that cost more than others.
Not in money, but in voice.

There are rooms I’ve left that still echo my silence.
I know what it’s like to shrink so another can feel bigger.
To whisper instead of sing.
To ration softness so it doesn't spill in front of someone who hasn’t earned it.

And then there’s this year, the one where the silence cracked.

I don't think healing is loud.
It's slow. It has soil under its fingernails and remembers what you planted before you even knew how to ask for spring.

This is the year I found my voice again, not in a scream, but in the whisper that kept returning long after I tried to silence it.
It said: Write anyway. Sing anyway. Hope anyway.

There’s a kind of love that’s coming.
The kind that doesn’t flinch when you tremble, or measure you in metrics you were never built for.
A love that arrives barefoot, with its own wound-map, and says, I see where it split you. I’m not afraid of the scar.

That kind of love doesn’t erase what came before.
It remembers it, so it can meet you in the after.

I’ve known the small men.
The ones who borrowed your fire to warm themselves, then punished you for burning.
Who called you too much just to keep you manageable.
Who mistook cruelty for intellect and domination for devotion.
I mourned them longer than they ever deserved.

But I’m not mourning anymore.
I’m building something else.
A life that doesn’t flinch.
A voice that doesn’t apologise.
A fire that no longer dims itself to fit in their cages.

This isn’t just healing.
It’s return.
To self.
To song.
To the kind of love that remembers the ache and chooses you because of it, not in spite of it.

And I’ll keep writing...even if I have to resurrect the language myself.

Because I’m not here to be chosen.
I’m here to be remembered.