Every Poisoned Well

There is nothing in the world that is not altered by the eye that beholds it. Even sorrow blushes beneath a gaze that does not flinch.

I haven't been able to find my voice lately. For the first time in a while, I didn't even care to write. I wrote this one for me, not to inspire, not to wrap it in silk and call it grace. I want to speak to the writers. To the ones who still leave comments. To the readers who still cry. To the ones who get up and try again, quietly, with no applause and no finish line. I want you to hear this. Not because you need saving, but because you are the saving.

The world hardened me.

It does that. It teaches you the cost of tenderness early and often. It teaches that vulnerability is weakness, generosity naïve, and hope a luxury for the blind. It sharpens its teeth on the softest parts of you. And if you’re not careful, you learn to flinch before you’ve even been struck.

But then, somehow, despite it all, there are those who still choose to look gently at the world. Who still speak. Still write. Still reach.

Each morning I open my eyes and scroll through a hundred tiny acts of defiance. A single mother writes about making it through another night with nothing but beans and a promise. A man with cancer writes about the way the sun hit the faucet while he brushed his teeth and how, for a second, it felt like a miracle. A girl who was hurt in a way no girl should ever be hurt writes three sentences that hold more life than most people live in a decade.

They do not just ask to be seen. They see. And that is everything.

We have made a world of distraction and sales pitches and performed agony, but every once in a while, someone writes something that shatters the noise. Not because it’s loud, but because it’s true. You read them and forget to breathe. They do not ask for agreement. They do not wrap their pain in pretty packages. They simply stand there, open. Alive.

Unapologetically awake.

That's what I aspire to. To stand in the middle of shit and say it's shit. To say it sucks. To not dress it up in some pretty message or plan or good suit. Because the lesson isn't that every cloud has a silver lining. It's that sometimes the storm destroys everything you built and there is no reason, no growth, no hidden gift wrapped in the wreckage. It's that we've been trained to smile through our own breaking, to find meaning in the graves of those gone, to call our trauma a teacher. But maybe real courage is looking at senseless loss and refusing to make it make sense. Maybe it's saying someone died and it wasn't part of some plan, my marriage ended and I didn't need to learn anything from it, my body failed me and there's no wisdom in the betrayal. Maybe it's understanding that some pain just exists, angry and purposeless and hungry, and our job isn't to feed it meaning but to survive it. The saving grace isn't in finding the lesson. It's in the brutal honesty of admitting that sometimes there isn't one, and loving ourselves enough to stop looking.

And on the days, days like today, I wanted to disappear into nothing, I read them. On the days I forgot my own worth, someone left a comment under a post and didn’t know they were speaking directly to the part of me that was still on fire. Sometimes it was just a line. Sometimes a whole story. But the point is, they wrote back. They sang when they had no breath left. They reached when they had no reason to believe anyone would reach back.

I have tried to do the same.

Not with perfection. Not always with grace. But with a kind of trembling ferocity. Because I believe, still, that there is more beauty in this world than we are told. That we are not here to win or conquer or perform. That some mornings, the highest form of resistance is just putting two words together that do not lie. That say, I see. That say, still here. That say, yes.

This is for the ones who sang while the world was flooding. Who refused to stop dancing just because the room caught fire. Who held up a single note like a torch while the rest of the world called it foolish. You have saved more lives than you know. You have saved mine. And that is no exaggeration.

So I am telling you now, whoever you are, wherever you sit reading this with your weary heart or your clenched jaw, your unfinished sentence or your overdrawn account, I am telling you. You are the song. You are the poem. You are the art. You are the miracle. You are the heart that proves we haven’t gone numb. You are what we make of this wreckage. You are what’s left that still dares to be beautiful.

I say this not for inspiration. This is a record. This is documentation of the unkillable, unbearable beauty that refuses to die, even here, even now, even beneath algorithms and wars and silence.

There are no saints in this. No legends. No chosen ones. Just people who get back up. Just people who post something honest and walk away. Just people who have been betrayed by almost everything except each other.

If there is a chance for us, it is because of you. The ones who still write. The ones who still sing. The ones who do not look away.

You altered the world by the way you beheld it.

And every sorrow, every broken heart, every poisoned well, blushed.

And then, slowly, began to change.