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This Time She Does Not Whisper
Growth, trepidation, and expansion pulse beneath her skin as she aches to shed what is no longer hers to hold.
Grief moves through her in feral disregard for her becoming, raw and pleading to be felt.
Years of what-ifs and the pangs of self-abandonment cling to her rib cage and settle like dense, unmovable boulders. They are present with each breath she takes, briefly eclipsing her light and hellbent on staying.
But slowly, day by day, they shift. They loosen their grip and dissolve with each tear shed and each word finally spoken aloud.
With alchemy embedded in her cells and loss as her greatest teacher, she tiptoes toward herself one once-muzzled crack in her voice at a time.
Unraveling within the labyrinth of self, she decides it’s time to toss herself the keys to her own cage, knowing the balm is in the wound.
The places she has been most afraid to touch hold the pieces of herself she has been searching for in people, relationships, and experiences. The wound knows exactly where she left herself behind. So she stops begging it to disappear and begins asking what it came to return to her. As deep-seated regrets slip from her spine, she sinks into remembrance.
There is something both devastating and liberating about realizing how many of her prisons became self-maintained. So often she was the one holding her own tongue.
Harboring release and expansion within the same labored breath, she gasps for air while suddenly realizing that reclaiming her voice is far from the pristine, linear ascent she wants it to be. Still, she trudges on.
She stops treating her darkness and years of silence as evidence that something has gone terribly wrong. She begins recognizing it as another chamber in the vast and complicated cathedral of being human. There are long, winding corridors with no windows, only mirrors, and the only thing lighting the way is the tiny flame she has learned to carry inside herself. Blindfolded most days, she still reaches, fingers stretching toward the blank canvas in front of her.
Like a snake’s body pressed tight against old skin, she discovers that growth is not soft or gentle. It burns and twists and aches and stretches. It forces her to rub against the jagged edges of her own limiting beliefs until what once protected her splits down the tender middle.
The woman she has outgrown hangs from her shoulders like a winter coat worn deep into spring.
She is familiar and heavy, and she no longer fits the season ahead. Beneath her, she has been sweating under layers she no longer needs.
She has worn this woman through brutal winters that could have killed her. She knows every frayed seam and missing button, and every place she learned to pull herself tighter when the world turned cold.
This was the woman who kept quiet to keep the peace.
She swallowed entire paragraphs and softened sentences that deserved exclamation points.
She tore pages from herself before anyone else had the chance to reject what was written there.
She contorted herself around the emotional limitations of other people and called it love.
But make no mistake, her silence was not weakness. It was how she survived.
Looking in the rearview mirror, she finally understands that grief is not a thief but a river. It does not simply take. It reshapes. It floods the places she thought were solid, tearing through old identities and washing away outdated stories. It carves canyons where certainty once lived, chiseling away the illusion that love required her to stay small and unseen.
And there comes a point when gripping the shoreline hurts more than letting the water carry her. The current asks only one thing: surrender. Become fluid. Stop trying to crawl back onto land that no longer exists.
Some days old memories arrive like autumn leaves, once desperately grasped, now falling effortlessly to the earth.
She no longer chases them downstream. She simply watches them pass, in awe they once belonged to her.
Still, there are tender days when the ache to belong to someone returns like an old wolf scratching at the door of her heart. But she no longer mistakes its howl for a command. She offers it a warm place beside the fire, where pain is no longer exiled, only held with unbridled compassion.
Healing, she learns, is not the absence of sorrow. It is the willingness to dance inside it without letting it lead. Some losses do not disappear just because enough time has passed. Some leave imprints too deep to erase, and perhaps they were never meant to be erased. Sorrow can live inside her without becoming the entirety of her.
She begins to love her shadow by memorizing the choreography of her own grief and stops running toward the light as though it is the only proof she is healing. She wanders into the darker chambers too; the ones she once kept dead-bolted. There she finds pieces of herself that could never have been recovered in the light. Some transformations require a temporary blindness, because the eyes we used to navigate our old life cannot yet see where we are going.
She no longer needs to turn every uncomfortable emotion into a lesson before she has even felt it.
She no longer slaps inauthentic gratitude over grief while the cut is still bleeding.
She does not need to alchemize every heartbreak by Tuesday or search for the silver lining while the storm is still ripping shingles off the roof.
And she now knows that no one is coming to rescue her. For the first time, that feels less like abandonment and more like liberation. The lighthouse she spent years searching for in other people has been glowing within her all along. The validation she ached for was patiently nestled in her DNA.
She kisses every abandoned version of herself on the forehead: the little girl who learned to make herself more palatable, the teenager who mistook rebellion for freedom, the young woman who confused longing for love, and the anxious adult who believed her worth depended solely on being chosen.
She thanks each of them for surviving. Then she lets them go.
Last, she turns to the timid woman in the winter coat; the one who never got to finish a sentence and shoved entire pieces of herself into pockets. She does not shame her or rush her. She slips the coat from her shoulders, folds it with the tenderness it earned, and sets it down.
You can rest now, she whispers. I’ll take it from here.
What she mistook for losing herself was the sacred undoing of everything she was never meant to carry. Beneath the rubble, beneath the grief, and beneath every story she mistook for truth, she finds only the tapestry of herself. It is intricate and worthy and whole, as she had always been.
The page in front of her is blank, its silence raw and ancient, terrifying and sacred. There are no expectations inked into the margins, and no hands but her own holding the pen. And she does not need to know how the story goes. She only needs to know that every sentence will finally sound like her.
The ending she mourned was never the end of her story. It was simply the first page that finally belonged to her.
She grabs the pen and clears her throat. And this time, despite the trembling beneath her skin, she does not whisper.
~
author: Rachel Dehler
Image: Author's Own
Editor: Molly Murphy
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