When You Noticed the Pattern

You didn’t scream.
You didn’t run.
You saw.

A thread,
familiar as breath,
woven through your choices,
your silences,
your tired yeses.

It wore your mother’s voice,
your father’s absence,
the echo of ancestors
who endured
but never exhaled.

The pattern,
braided into bone,
told you:
stay small,
stay quiet,
stay needed.

But one morning,
with a trembling hand
and a truth that refused
to stay buried—
you pulled the thread.

You didn’t unravel.
You awakened.

You traced grief
back to its origin.
You kissed the wound
instead of hiding it.
You sat with the ghost
until it became
an ancestor.

And when the voices rose—
“You’re changing,”
“You’re selfish,”
“You think you’re better”—
you smiled.
Because you were.

You became the river
that refused to run dry.
You became the altar
that refused to burn for others.
You became the first of your bloodline
to return to yourself.

To say:
I choose me.
I choose peace without apology.
I choose joy without shrinking.
I choose truth, even when it costs comfort.

And that is when the sky opened.
Not with thunder,
but with clarity.

You were not breaking.
You were birthing.

A new legacy.
A new language.
A new liberation.

Feathered with grace,
fierce with knowing,
free as breath,
as flight,
as the bird
that remembers
she was never the cage—

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