I have spent so much of my life disappearing in increments, folding myself into the fractures of people who never learned how to hold me without breaking something. I made a religion out of understanding, called my silence compassion, called my exhaustion love. I swallowed every unsaid thing until my throat became a graveyard for all the versions of me I was too afraid to disappoint. And God, how tired I am of being the offering. The open wound. The sacrificial lamb dressed in borrowed softness.
I have given pieces of myself away like they were endless, like I could keep bleeding and somehow remain whole. I have mistaken being needed for being loved, and being tolerated for having somewhere to belong. But something inside me is beginning to bare its teeth. I no longer want to make a home out of places that require my disappearance. I no longer want to carve myself smaller just to fit inside the comfort of someone else’s expectations.
Let the guilt come. Let the silence stretch. Let those who grew accustomed to my self-abandonment call my boundaries cruelty. I am done laying my heart on the altar of everyone else’s needs and calling the bleeding devotion. There are pieces of me I want back. The dreams I buried. The words I swallowed. The softness I spent so long mistaking for something the world was entitled to take.
I want to find the girl who existed before she learned that love meant leaving herself behind. I want to tell her she was never asking for too much, that she was never meant to be the sacrifice. And if choosing myself means becoming unrecognizable to those who benefited from my undoing, then let me become a stranger. Let me shed every expectation that has ever asked me to bleed quietly.
I have spent enough of my life abandoning myself to make room for everyone else. Now, I want to take up space inside my own existence. I want to belong to myself. And this time, I refuse to disappear just to be loved.
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