There is a reckoning that visits the bold.
Not the loud ones.
Not the righteous ones.
But the quiet, cracked-open warriors
who whispered “no more”
with blood in their mouth
and fire in their lungs.
It’s a sacred thing—
to trace the bruises on your soul
and know that some of them
were put there by your own hand.
To see the crooked path behind you
and admit:
I built this road.
Stone by stone.
Lie by lie.
Silence by silence.
Choice by choice.
And still—
you keep walking.
Not to escape it.
But to rewrite it.
To find the place where the pain first entered
and say to your children:
Not through me.
Not anymore.
If you’ve never stood in the middle of your own war,
knees buckling under inherited weight—
if you’ve never heard the ancestors weep
when you chose to heal instead of hide—
if you’ve never pulled a rusted sword from your own ribcage
and used it to cut the cord of generational shame—
then maybe you’ve lived a life of comfort,
not courage.
Because those of us who bled to make things different
did not do it for praise.
We did it so the next ones
would not have to crawl
just to remember
they were born to rise.