The Little Girl and Her Secrets

There are Secrets locked inside me. They stand in line now, orderly, like witnesses summoned to court. Once, they screamed over one another, a mob at the gates. But the Little Girl has quieted, and the Secrets wait their turn.

My anxiety was a seven‑year‑old girl. She ran, always just ahead, daring me to catch her. For years I chased her, interrogated her, mocked her, bullied her. I tried to break her, but she is still here. She no longer runs, only waits wary.

🎶 Mad Girl — Emilie Autumn

My madness was a sixteen‑year‑old Opheliac, pale wrists and padded walls. I locked her in her own asylum, lit only by gaslight. I fed her pills like communion wafers, gagged her voice, restrained her hands. She grew up in a world where her pain was invalid, her existence a diagnosis.

🎶 Take the Pill — Emilie Autumn

And my inner critic—ah, she was a thirty‑five‑year‑old perfectionist, racing to a finish line that never existed. She bullied me in the name of love, hid her own terror behind control. She silenced me with the lie that my thoughts and feelings meant nothing. She was not cruel for cruelty’s sake; she was terrified.

Trauma fractures the mind into shards, pearls of pain sealed in nacre. Every moment I could not face became a bead strung on a necklace of ghosts. I armored myself in that string of pearls, a tower of scar tissue. Half a person, half a life, hiding from the world.

I will not name all the traumas. They belong to me. But I have faced their echoes, and that is enough. I know now who I am at the marrow. The past forged me, but does not define me. My critic, once my captor, now burns in her own fire. She collapses into ash.

And when the flames gutter out, she rises again. Not as my enemy, but reborn.

She rises Winterborn.

🎶 Winterborn (Subway to Sally Mix) — The Crüxshadows