30 Days of Radical Honesty Journalling Challenge – Day 20: What part of my past am I still trying to outrun?

The part of my past I’m still trying to outrun isn’t a moment. It’s not a memory or a mistake or a version of myself I no longer recognize.

It’s a person.

A person who cleaved into me like a butcher’s knife. Sharp. Violent. Precise in their cruelty. I don’t use the word cleaved lightly—I mean it in the way a meat cleaver breaks through bone. I was young, still forming, still soft. And they knew exactly how to strike.

The moment I had the freedom to run, I did. I put oceans and years and everything I could between me and them. And still—they worm their way back. Like rot finding the cracks in the foundation. Like smoke slipping through the walls. They are persistent in their delusion, convinced that proximity is a privilege, that anyone with sense must be clawing to get back in.

Let me be clear: I am not clawing.

I don’t want to see them. I don’t want to know them. I don’t want to be connected to them by six degrees or sixty. Not even by Kevin Bacon.

They’ve built a fantasy in their mind—this tragic little empire in the corner of their crumbled world. A throne made of imagined success and self-importance. They sit there, lips pursed, convinced the world is clamouring at their boundaries, desperate to scale their walls.

Keep your walls.

Keep your fortress of delusion. Keep your stench of self-righteousness and that rotten, bitter air that surrounds you. Stay on your side of it. I’m not coming in. I never was.

I want nothing from you.

Not your validation. Not your apology. Not your version of events. I have spent enough of my life tending to wounds you caused and then called fiction. Enough of my life shrinking under the weight of your warped narrative. Enough of my life looking over my shoulder.

The truth is, I’m not afraid of you anymore.

But you still disgust me.

And while I’m no longer running out of fear, I am still running—because I don’t ever want to breathe the same air again.

I don’t need closure. I need distance. And I have it. And I’m keeping it.

Peace, Love, and Inspiration,
~Britt Wolfe💚