This Moment Is Not My Life

I am not what was done to me.
Not the fracture.
Not the silence.
Not the hands that held power like a weapon
and called it love.

I am not the rooms I was made small in,
nor the versions of myself
I had to become to survive them.
I am not the pause between apologies
that never came.

This moment—
this sting, this ache,
this trial dressed as truth—
it does not name me.

I am not what they decided.
Not their story,
not their shame,
not their frame pressed down upon my spirit
until I forgot it could rise.

I am not the echo
of someone else's choices.
Not the scars that still shimmer
when the light hits wrong.
Not the chaos that knocks at my door
and tries to make itself at home.

I am not my past.
And I am not my pain.

I am becoming—
constantly.
Boldly.
In the quiet of my own knowing.
In the certainty that this moment
is a blink, not a biography.

I will not be frozen here.
I will not be written
by hands that never asked
what it meant to be me.

This is not the sum of me.
This is not the whole of my life.

This is just a moment.
One thread in a story still unfolding.
A spark—
not the fire.
A shadow—
not the shape.

And I am walking forward.

Not because it’s easy.
But because I know
there is more to become
than this.