Messed Up Kid

I was just a messed-up kid

trying to make sense of a life

that never slowed down long enough

for me to breathe.

People saw the attitude,

the anger,

the way I shut down first

so no one else could beat me to it.

They didn’t see the trembling underneath—

the part of me begging

for someone to just stay.

I learned early

that love had sharp edges,

and silence could bruise too.

I carried secrets like stones in my pockets,

heavy enough to drown me

but somehow I kept walking.

Every mistake I made

felt like another reason to apologize

for being alive.

They called me trouble.

They called me dramatic.

They called me broken.

But they never called me a kid

who needed softness.

Who needed someone to speak gently

in a world that only knew how to shout.

I grew up thinking chaos was normal,

that pain was proof of living,

that I had to earn every small piece of kindness

by bleeding first.

I didn’t know

that survival doesn’t mean you’re unlovable—

just that you had to grow thorns

before you ever learned how to bloom.

And yeah, maybe I was a messed-up kid.

But I was also brave.

I carried things I never asked for,

held up a sky that wasn’t mine,

and still managed to find a way

to keep going.

Now I look back at that version of me—

the scared one,

the angry one,

the quiet one hiding behind wildfire eyes—

and I want to tell them

they weren’t ruined.

They were shaped.

Forged.

Built out of battles

they were never meant to fight alone.

Maybe I was a messed-up kid,

but I’m not that kid anymore.

And if I am—

if parts of them still live in me—

I hold them gently now.

I let them rest.

I let them be more than their wounds.

Because the truth is,

I didn’t grow up wrong.

I grew up surviving.

And surviving

is its own kind of strength.