Strong

For the strong ones who want to be fearlessly soft sometimes — without being squashed under the worlds feet, becoming silenced and unseen. I hear you. I see you.

Photo by Zach Vessels on Unsplash

They say you are difficult to love, but this is untrue, they are not equipped — to handle the wild within you.

Right from the start you used to say to me ‘you’re so strong’, but you never understood how this was both a compliment and a curse.

Those words subconsciously, cast me in the role of the SuperShero without a cape — always strong enough to save the day. From the moment they left your lips and seeped through my skin, the dissonance I’ve been afraid of my whole life — began creeping in. Now they haunt me like the warped lyrics of a scratched record — a broken beat on repeat. Or the grim tale of a distant story — that I used to read.

Once upon a time…
there was a little girl who looked just like me, who wondered about what she would be. Day in and day out, she was told by grown ups as far as her eyes could see ‘ you have to be strong’, or the big, bad world would flood her with it’s wicked ideas — of who she ought to be. Be strong they’d say, or this world will tear you apart, call you outside of your name and rewrite your own heart.