The Coal Pot

Fragments of my Mind

🖤

You remembered everyone's birthday.

You showed up with food when they were sick. You answered the 2am call. You sat with people through their hard seasons like through the breakups, the losses, the moments when life fell apart for them.

You showed up every time.

And when your hard season came,
Your phone was quiet.

Not all at once. That's not how it happens.
It was slow. Subtle. The way a person slowly stops mentioning things because mentioning things stopped feeling safe.

The way you learned to say I'm fine before anyone even asked, because asking felt like too much to put on people who never really had space for you anyway.

So you got smaller.
Then smaller.

Until one day you woke up at your age and didn't know what you liked anymore. Didn't know what made you happy outside of making sure everyone else was okay. Didn't know who you were when nobody needed anything from you.

Just you.

Alone with yourself.
And it felt like meeting a stranger.
That feeling has a name.
It's called losing yourself. And it doesn't happen because you were weak.
It happened because you loved people with everything you had and forgot to save anything for the person who needed it most.

You.

You are not too late.

I know that's hard to believe right now. It sounds like something people say. But I mean it in the most specific way possible,
The woman you were before the world taught you to shrink.

Before you started apologizing for needing things.
Before you confused being easy to be around with being worthy of love.

She is not gone.

She is just waiting for you to come back for her. The way you always came back for everyone else.

This time,
go back for yourself.

This page is for you, sis. For the woman who is tired of surviving and ready to finally live. Who is scared but still here. Who lost herself in the giving and is slowly, quietly, finding her way back.

Follow.

These words will meet you where you are.

Sometimes I sit with my thoughts and ask myself
what my life would have looked like
if I never went through what I went through.

I wonder how far I would have gone by now.
What I would have built.
Who I would have become
if pain never knocked on my door.

I wonder how quiet my mind would be
if there were no wounds,
no memories asking to be healed,
no nights spent learning how to breathe again.

Maybe I would have loved myself easily.
Naturally.
Without waiting for life or people
to show me how.

Yet here I am.
Still standing.
Still breathing.
Still choosing to rise.

And I realize something soft and powerful.
I am not behind.
I am not broken.
I am becoming.

What I went through did not ruin me.
It gave me depth.
It gave me compassion.
It gave me a skin that knows how to survive storms.

Everyone carries something.
Some wounds are loud.
Some are quiet.
But no one walks this life untouched.

I am healing.
Slowly.
Honestly.
And one day, I will help others heal too.

I still wonder sometimes.
But I am grateful.
Because the lessons shaped me.
And the growth came from places that once hurt.

So tell me…
what did life put you through that changed you forever, and what did it awaken in you that you never knew you had?