The Person You Are Slowly Becoming

You are not the same person you were before any of this. You cannot be. You have seen what you have seen, lived what you have lived, learned what you have learned. That person existed in a different country, with a different map. The map you have now is different. So is the country.

That is not a loss. Or it is not only a loss.

Yes, something was taken. Yes, you have wounds. Yes, there are quiet places you carry that you wish you did not have to carry. And — alongside all of that — you are gentler now, and clearer, and more honest, and more your own.

You see more than you used to. You catch yourself faster when you are slipping back into old patterns of making yourself small. You can feel, sooner, when something is off — and you do not argue with that feeling the way you once would have. You know what care actually looks like, because you came to know what its opposite looks like.

You have learned what you can survive. You have learned that you can be tired and still get up. You have learned that you can be afraid and still keep going. You have learned that you can lose something and still build something else. None of that is hardness. That is steadiness.

You are done, mostly, performing. You are done abandoning yourself for someone else's comfort. You have come to know the price of disappearing from your own life, and you are not paying that price again.

This is not damage. This is a slow refining. Some parts of you are being set down because they were never yours in the first place — the over-explaining, the apologizing for taking up space, the quick yes that you did not really mean. Other parts of you are being claimed, perhaps for the first time — your quiet yes, your firm no, your sense of what is honest, your love for the people who love you well.

The person you are becoming is someone worth being. Not because what happened was needed to make you, but because, against everything, you are choosing that person anyway.