It’s as though my heart is made of taffy and sharp hooks are digging into it, ripping and pulling in every direction, pouring out of my mouth, my feet, my eyes, hands, between my legs. And it burns and scalds yet freezes and scars me all at once. There’s nothing I can do to escape this as it feels more a part of me than the air I breathe.

I’ve spent far too many nights letting cool tiles eat my tears and consume my screams, convincing myself that everything I was feeling was far too raw, far too messy, far too much to ever invite anyone into, permanently or intimately. I convinced myself and believed that the hurt I felt I needed to carry on my own shaky shoulders, because I was the only one who would ever truly understand how it feels to live with what I’ve gone through. So I shut it all out. The love, the comfort, the kindness. I produced a mads made of steal, hardwired to defend her story and reactions to pain at every turn. A mads so firm, yet inherently terrified of the vulnerability in being seen that I crippled myself with walls made of broken glass, transparent yet warped, encased in vines of lies and false truths. Designed for no one’s protection other than my own, or so I thought.

And as apology after apology poured out of my teeth, I sharpened the ammunition hidden in the walls of my castle—the space that had quickly become my cage. I have no idea what specific moment in my life that shattered these walls or if it was many moments that slowly picked at my tattered surroundings, but eventually or suddenly—who knows—I burst through that shelter shining with the blood of my own heartbreak, yet shining all the same. And it wasn’t until I stood and looked at the sun without the warped effects my cage had created, that I finally was able to say, unapologetically: this is me.