What Was Done to Us, What We Refuse to Become
1 There is a lie that says pain must harden you into cruelty.
2 Another lie says forgiveness requires forgetting.
3 Both are convenient to those who caused the harm.
4 What was done to you was real, even if it was minimized.
5 The scar proves contact occurred.
6 Naming the wound is not vengeance; it is orientation.
7 You cannot choose a direction until you admit where you are standing.
8 Some were hurt by hands. Some by systems. Some by silence that lingered too long.
9 Neglect leaves marks as sharp as blows.
10 Betrayal teaches faster than textbooks.
11 You learned what power looks like when it is unaccountable.
12 You learned how easily harm dresses itself as necessity.
13 This knowledge is dangerous in the wrong hands.
14 That is why you were told to bury it.
15 But scars are not meant to be hidden; they are meant to warn and to guide.
16 You are allowed to be angry without becoming violent.
17 You are allowed to grieve without apologizing for the time it takes.
18 Healing does not mean excusing what broke you.
19 It means choosing what will not pass through you unchanged.
20 You may interrupt the pattern.
21 You may set the knife down.
22 You may decide that pain stops here.
23 This choice will be tested.
24 Old wounds will try to vote in new moments.
25 Listen, but do not hand them the pen.
26 You are not required to become proof of someone else’s theology.
27 You are not obligated to make sense of cruelty.
28 Let the scar become a boundary, not a blueprint.
29 Let it teach you how to recognize harm sooner.
30 Let it teach you tenderness where you once learned armor.
31 What was done to you ends with you.
32 What you build from it belongs to the future.