Echos of Insight

Learning the difference between surviving the fire and living in the light.

I didn’t always know what gentleness meant—not the kind that makes you feel safe in your own skin.
There was love in my house, but it lived inside expectation.
Once the babies came, there was no time left for lingering.
I became the one who knew what to do—the helper, the example, the extra set of hands.
When I needed help myself, it often felt like asking was an interruption.
Mistakes drew correction, not comfort.
So I learned early how to stay in line, how to read the room, how to earn approval by being easy—
and when the room got loud, I learned how to match its volume.

So I learned to meet the world on its own terms.
I sharpened my tongue until it could cut.
I wore cynicism like a coat that couldn’t be penetrated.
Better to laugh first, to bite first, than to be the one caught off guard.
Sharpness became survival.

The trouble is, survival has a long memory.
It remembers the slammed doors and the nights you sleep with one eye open.
Even when the danger passes, the edge stays.

For years, every attempt at closeness carried a warning:
don’t get too comfortable,
don’t trust too deeply.
To be loved was to brace.

Someone wrote it in a song once:

But love was a cold bed full of scorpions.
The venom stole her sanity.
And if you’d never come for me, I might’ve lingered in purgatory.
You wrap around me like a chain, a crown, a vine—pulling me into the fire.

I understood that kind of love—
the kind that flares, devours, leaves ash.
But the lesson I hadn’t learned yet
was what comes after the fire.

Somewhere along the way, I discovered softness could be chosen.
Not handed to me,
not taken for granted—
chosen.

Scarred, deliberate, costly.
The kind of softness that comes only after you’ve lived the other way long enough
to know it will kill you if you stay.

These days I build warmth that doesn’t scorch,
though some days the flame still tests me—
and the mirror starts to smoke.