Echos of Insight

The story I lived wasn’t the one I wrote.

For a long time, my life was a story other people told.
I was the daughter shaped by her father’s rules,
the partner mistaken for someone easier to love,
the woman defined by what she could hold together.

I became fluent in wearing roles I never chose,
fluent in disguising my own voice
until I could barely recognize it.

The hardest part wasn’t losing myself—
it was believing for years that the projections were me.
That the dutiful woman, molded by reputation and repentance,
sustained by guilt and grace,
the reliable glue everyone leaned on but no one truly saw,
was who I thought I had to be.

It takes a long time to realize
the reflection in the mirror was drawn by other hands.

Reclamation didn’t come all at once.
It came in small ruptures,
little acts of refusal:
a truth spoken too bluntly,
a silence held too long,
a lie left unanswered.

Each one peeled away a layer of story that didn’t belong to me.
Each one reminded me
there was a voice under the noise.

Someone wrote it in a song once:

They said, “Babe, you gotta fake it till you make it,” and I did.
Lights, camera, bitch smile, even when you wanna die.
Breaking down, I hit the floor,
All the pieces of me shattered as the crowd was chanting “More.”
I was grinning like I’m winning, I was hitting my marks,
’Cause I can do it with a broken heart.

I understood that kind of survival—
the performance that keeps you moving
even as something inside you caves.

I lived that way for years,
mistaking endurance for identity,
mistaking applause for belonging.

When I finally began to write—
honestly, directly,
without softening the edges—
I realized that was the act of reclamation itself.

Writing wasn’t just recording the story.
It was rewriting the author.

Somewhere in those pages,
a voice I’d buried began to breathe again.