How to be brilliant while bleeding, Is understanding that stillness is a kind of death. Because if we stop, even for a moment, the war will open its jaws and take us whole. We know the war well — we used to call it mother. Father. God. Home. We named it monster, but never loud enough to be heard through the Sunday walls.
The truth? We too have become monsters in our own ways — sharpened by silence, carved by shame, baptized in betrayal. Not born this way, no. Made. Forged in rooms where love had conditions and survival meant shrinking the soul to fit inside a body still shaking. To feel is too dangerous. To feel is to remember. And to remember is to bleed out — again — and again on the altar of a family’s denial.
So we stay in motion. I stay in motion.
We run from the mirror; I run from the mirror.
From the wound, from the terrible return. Because we know that to bleed is not just a place. It’s a haunting. A ritual. A home that eats its young and calls it legacy.
The monsters we speak of. Not beasts. Just children—unseen. We are Women—unheard. We are Men—undone. Made savage by a world that feasts on the soft and spits out the strange. We are not evil. Though we know evil. No, we are only desperate. Only trying—terribly, tenderly—to survive a world that never let the soul stay clean.
And so, we believed the lies. That salvation was shaped like a diploma. That the move to that new city would wash it all away. That designer bags could carry our grief. My grief. That a cool car could outrun the ache. That a bestseller list would resurrect the dead parts. But success is a different kind of cage. The shinier kind. The lonelier kind. Because what they once named freedom was, in truth, another prison — just with better lighting. The more we won, the more we withered. The higher we rose, the hollower we became. Disconnected from self, from spirit, from each other. No, we are not thriving. We are bleeding beneath velvet. Still fighting the war no one could see. Still craving a home, we had to build from scratch because the one we came from was made of glass.
And I had no friends; we have no friends. No family. No family. Not in the way that mattered.
And I hated myself for allowing it. We hate ourselves for allowing. For not knowing how to say no. For believing that to be loved, we had to be useful. I had to be useful. And beneath that rage, was grief. Old and sticky. Like something inherited. Like something no one ever taught me how to name. Most of us live in that grief. 80% of you cloaked in sorrow. While Only 20% of you is permitted to enter the daylight.
And yet—God, yet—I still wanted love. We want love. I chased it. We chase it.
Clawed toward it like a moth to a flame, burning for the possibility that someone, somewhere, might choose you without needing to be rescued without you having to bleed. But instead, we give ourselves to the void. Again. And again. Because even an empty room feels better than the silence of being untouched.
To bleed is to know, that every win we collect came with a funeral. A funeral for the girl who never got to rest. A funeral for the woman we had to kill just to keep going. And so, we shrink. Not from lack of pride, but from the shame that clings to skin like smoke. We grow afraid— of joy, of how much we could accomplish while mourning quietly beneath it all. Of how easy we made it look—the curated beauty, the aesthetics— while something inside us was still unraveling. Still burying versions of us no one ever bothered to eulogize.
How so often we live split— between the world that praises us, and the shadowed one inside you that whispers: "You’re still not safe….You’re still not home." But beneath the light, we are mourning— mourning the girl we never got to be. Mourning the silence we mistook for strength. Mourning the ease with which we made survival look like grace.
And I didn’t know how to stop. We didn’t know to stop. Didn’t know how to show myself my own heart. Didn’t know how to admit that success, without healing, felt like standing in a mansion with no windows. Airless. Soundless. Full of beauty and still suffocating. So I wore my distance like a silk dress. Tailored. Elegant. Misunderstood. They called me cold. Detached. Unmoved. A bitch. But they didn’t know that I had learned how to be brilliant while bleeding. That I had taught myself how to shine so no one would ask where it hurt.
To be alone—truly alone—is not some gentle silence, some poetic solitude. No. It is a kind of war. It is waking each day with no one to witness your unfolding. It is carrying your story like a wounded limb, learning to dress it yourself, whisper to it, hush its screaming in the night. Being alone is not peace—it is battle. A soldier’s kind of loneliness.
And still, somehow, you go on. Not because it gets easier. But because you’ve come to understand survival is not always about winning. Sometimes, it’s just about refusing to lay down.
To you, reader — To the one carrying it all and still showing up — you are not alone, friend. All the quiet shakes. The weight that presses into your chest when the world is still. The thoughts that crawl in like shadows at midnight: You aren’t worth it. No one loves you. Everyone leaves.
Yes. Those. They are not yours alone. They are mine too. They are the ancient ghosts many of us sleep beside. You are not broken for feeling them — you are simply human. Maybe, like me, you are exhausted. Exhausted from running, from performing strength, from pretending that the ache isn’t growing louder inside you. Because truthfully — hasn’t it always felt safer to dream in silence than to watch those dreams fall apart in daylight? Maybe you're tired of the dark, like I am. Tired of being afraid to hope. Tired of waking each morning already grieving yourself.
Moving through the day like a ghost haunting a life you were told should be enough.
But friend, hear me: we cannot heal by hiding. Not anymore. To get through this war — the war within, — we will have to walk through the fire. Not around it. Not above it.
But Through it.
Beautiful writing, thank you for sharing!