(I Didn’t Just Survive Them) I Outgrew Them
Read more poetry by Britt Wolfe
They think survival is the headline.
The narrow escape.
The dramatic after.
They think I crawled away
and called it victory.
But survival was only the beginning.
I did not stay where they left me.
I did not orbit their damage,
replaying it like scripture.
I did not build a life
around what they took.
I grew.
Past their reach.
Past their language.
Past the version of me
they needed to believe
they had destroyed.
Outgrowing is quieter than revenge.
It doesn’t announce itself.
It doesn’t circle back
to prove a point.
It simply makes the old terrain
uninhabitable.
Their tactics stopped working
because I no longer lived
at that altitude.
Their lies lost oxygen.
Their threats lost direction.
Their obsession starved
without my fear to feed it.
They stayed the same size.
That’s the part they never forgive.
Still rehearsing the same scripts.
Still mistaking volume for authority.
Still dragging their history behind them
like proof they refuse to examine.
Meanwhile, I learned
how to hold complexity.
How to metabolize pain
into something useful.
How to become unrecognizable
without becoming hard.
Outgrowing is not erasure.
It is expansion.
I didn’t forget what they did—
I just stopped living
inside it.
I carry perspective now.
Distance.
A horizon they can’t even see
from where they’re standing.
They look up and call it arrogance.
They look up and call it betrayal.
But it’s just scale.
I didn’t just survive them.
I outgrew them
the way trees outgrow fences—
not angrily,
not dramatically,
but inevitably.
And one day they looked up
and realized
they were no longer tall enough
to cast a shadow.
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