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.
Through the Fog 