I was baptized in violence
before I ever knew God.
Not water, but hands.
Not prayer, but threats
dressed up as discipline.
I was taught pain
before I learned language.
Hands came first.
Words came sharper.
My name was spoken like a warning.
My body learned the alphabet of fear.
Flinch, fold, survive.
Love arrived wearing boots
and taught me how to bleed quietly.
I learned early
that pain lasts longer
when you make noise,
so I swallowed my screams
until they grew teeth
and started chewing me from the inside.
“Children should be seen
and not heard.”
I learned early
how to disappear
without leaving.
Childhood wasn’t stolen.
It was hunted.
Tracked through hallways,
cornered in small rooms,
taught that mercy was accidental
and safety was a rumor.
My childhood lives in my shoulders.
That permanent lift,
like I’m bracing for a blow.
Every silence sounds loaded.
I grew up fast
because survival doesn’t wait
for permission
or for softness.
It demands it!
By the time I was grown
my bones were already tired.
My nervous system lived like a war zone.
Sirens in the blood,
shrapnel in the breath.
Even joy felt dangerous,
like standing too close to fire
after you’ve learned what burns do.
I found relief
where I could.
In bottles that promised forgetting,
in habits that slowed the noise.
Vibrations that hummed
just loud enough
to drown out the echo.
I didn’t want oblivion.
I wanted mercy.
I wanted the screaming
to lie down.
But mercy is expensive,
and I always paid in myself.
Now I am the cornerstone
of a house built on unspoken damage.
I don’t get to crack.
I don’t get to kneel.
If I collapse,
everyone else falls through me.
I carry generations
that never healed,
so they handed their hurt to me
like inheritance.
Generational grief
wrapped in familiar faces,
asking me not to drop it.
Some nights
I can feel the pressure
compressing my organs,
turning breath into work,
turning love into obligation.
Some days
I feel like a dam
plugged with my own ribs
so no one sees
the looming flood.
I wake up already exhausted
from holding tomorrow together.
Bone-deep exhaustion.
I am praised for my strength
by people who don’t hear
the sound it makes
when it fractures.
I am called reliable
because I never break in public.
Because I learned long ago
that breaking is a luxury
reserved for people
who were protected.
Still,
I remain!
Scarred, yes.
Shaking, often.
But here.
Every day I choose not to disappear,
which might be the most violent act
of defiance I know.
Every day I stay alive
despite the part of me
that learned survival
by imagining escape.
I am proof
that brutality failed
to finish the job.
That addiction didn’t win.
That the child who endured
grew into a man
who refuses to abandon himself
the way others did.
I am not gentle
because life wasn’t.
But I am tender
in ways that matter.
I protect because no one did.
I endure because someone had to.
And if this world ever asks
how much one person can hold
before they shatter,
let my body be the answer.
Let my survival be loud.
Let my pain be believed.
Let the child who was hurt
know this:
You did not deserve it.
You never did.
And you are still here,
bleeding light
through every crack.