Nabad Rising

Who were you,

before the world told you what to be,

and before the women who raised you

knew what they were passing on?

There is a particular silence in women who were raised to carry everything and name nothing. You learned it early. It became the shape of how you moved through the world.

You were handed a script the moment you were born. Told what to do, how to act, and who you had to become. It happened so early and so constantly that you stopped questioning whether any of it was actually yours.

Beyond the Script

For years, you played the roles: the daughter, the sister, the good woman. You wore those expectations like a second skin until you forgot where they ended and you began.

Those roles were handed to you. And before you, they were handed to the women who raised you, by the women who raised them. Nobody chose them consciously. Nobody sat down and decided what to pass on. It simply moved, quietly, through the generations, until it arrived at you wearing the shape of your own personality.

Then comes the earthquake of identity. It hits so hard it doesn't care about your roles. It strips you down to something you do not have a name for yet. What surfaces first is not always grief. Sometimes it is fury. The most honest thing you have felt in years.

What we don't heal, we hand down. The patterns, the silences, the wounds don't disappear. They travel through the bloodline, mother to daughter, lifetime to lifetime, wearing different faces until someone finally turns around and looks.

In the sudden, terrifying silence that follows, you finally hear it: the heavy, suppressed beat of your own pulse.

The Reclamation

You were buried under versions of yourself that other people needed you to be. The earthquake removed enough weight that what was already there could finally breathe.