The Things You Never Saw

I was not born small,

though you liked to press me

into corners

and call the shape I made

my nature.

You thought wisdom arrived

with soft voices

and folded hands—

that it wore Sunday shoes

and waited for permission to speak.

But mine came differently.

Mine arrived barefoot,

hair unpinned,

heart too large for the frame

you kept trying

to measure me against.

I carried whole worlds

in my chest,

maps of futures

I was drawing

before I could name them—

and you called it foolishness.

You called it trouble.

You called it too much.

All the while,

you held a ledger in your fist,

scratching tally marks

for every spark I let slip—

every unfiltered thought,

every refusal to shrink,

every instinct that told me

I was capable

of more than your imagination

could bear.

You mistook my boldness

for imbalance,

my passion

for a flaw in the machinery.

You studied my missteps

with a scholar’s devotion

and never once noticed

the way I kept getting back up

with something new in my hands—

a lesson,

a truth,

a strength you never taught me.

And now,

standing in the doorway

of what I’ve become,

I can say it plainly:

I was wise all along.

You were simply too busy

counting the cracks

to see the architecture—

too intent on the noise

of my growing

to recognize the music

of it.

You forgot that girls

are not meant to be trimmed

into silence.

We bloom loudly.

We break rules.

We outgrow rooms

built by smaller minds.

And when we’re told

we are nothing but faults,

we learn to become

entire fault lines—

reshaping the earth

beneath our own feet.