The Day I Remembered Who I Was
I used to think feeling like an alien meant something was wrong with me. That the distance I felt from this world was a flaw, a fracture, a failure to belong. I didn’t have language for it then. I only knew that I felt dropped into a life that didn’t quite fit, wearing a skin that learned how to survive before it ever learned how to rest.
For a long time, I believed everything had to be earned. Love. Safety. Worth. I believed sacrifice was the price of being allowed to stay. That if I gave enough of myself away, I might finally be permitted to exist without causing harm. Eventually, that belief turned inward. I thought the final offering would have to be me.
When my life broke open, it wasn’t gentle. It was violent, disorienting, and irreversible. Something in me had to die for something truer to live. What left wasn’t my soul. It was the version of me built from fear, obligation, and inherited silence. The part of me that mistook endurance for purpose.
Going back into the memories of my childhood with adult eyes shattered me in ways I still don’t have words for. But this time, I didn’t run. I stayed present. I watched. I let myself feel what I was never allowed to feel before. In the fire, I learned the difference between punishment and liberation.
Now, it feels like something endless is leaving my body. Old identities. Old contracts. Old stories that were never mine to carry. Like wings I kept folded for lifetimes are finally remembering how to open. I don’t feel like an alien anymore.
I took back the pen.
I am no longer surviving someone else’s story. I am not lost. I am not broken. I am creating. I always was.
