THE MIRROR DOESN’T LIE—BUT IT DOESN’T FORGIVE EITHER
A raw confession from the wreckage: on survival, sabotage, and the ache to belong.
I. THE FIRST GLANCE
The mirror doesn’t lie.
But it does something worse.
It remembers.
The breath you tried to end.
The silence that curled around your throat.
The moment you looked into the glass—
and didn’t recognize the thing still breathing.
Still as a scalpel.
Honest as a scar.
It waits. It watches. It testifies.
I used to think the mirror was a weapon.
Some mornings, it still is.
It remembers the voice that said “Do it.”
The sound of the bottle tipping.
The dog at the door.
The silence after I didn’t.
Survival doesn’t look good under fluorescent light.
II. THE INSTINCT THAT WON’T DIE
I still don’t know where I’m going.
Just that I’m not who I was.
And maybe—
not even the one who survived.
Some days I run toward healing.
Other days I run like it’s a setup.
Because survival rewired me.
To expect pain.
Especially when it wears kindness like perfume.
If the voice sharpens.
If the air thickens.
If someone tilts their head like she did—
I disappear.
Not physically.
Just... underneath.
I self-destruct.
Revert.
Wound first—so I don’t get wounded again.
I do it with my parents.
With my sister.
With Jenny.
With strangers brave enough to stay.
Not because I want to be alone—
but because I was trained to fear belonging.
III. THE YEAR I SET MYSELF ON FIRE
This year didn’t heal me.
It hollowed me.
Burned me to ash so I could find what still pulsed underneath.
I tried to re-enter the world with skin that hadn’t grown back.
Tried to love while flinching from my own name.
Tried to believe I was allowed to exist—
unmasked, unpolished, unafraid.
But the lie of worthlessness doesn’t go quietly.
It lingers like smoke.
It recites old sermons in my bones.
You’re too much.
You’re not enough.
You don’t belong.
Marianne and her mother didn’t invent those lies.
They just confirmed them.
Put them on speakerphone.
Carved them into glass.
And part of me still believes them.
Part of me still feels like a ghost in a house I built with my own hands.
IV. THE BODY THAT STILL REMEMBERS
I carry it all.
In my jaw.
In my fists.
In the space between inhale and scream.
My body flinches before my mind catches up.
And when I’m triggered, I disappear—into someone else.
The protector.
The performer.
The ghost.
Just like that, I’m back in that kitchen.
That garage.
That goddamn silence that tasted like metal and mercy.
It doesn’t take much.
A tone.
A phrase.
A glance I misread because my nervous system still believes love can kill.
Then I say things I don’t mean.
Or worse—I mean them in the moment, because I’m not me anymore.
I’m the version that survived her.
V. THE ONES WHO DON’T KNOW THAT LANGUAGE
It’s hard to explain to people who never lived through it.
Harder still to explain to people who love you.
My sister asks:
“Why do you act like this?”
“She’s gone—why aren’t you?”
“Context isn’t permission.”
I want to scream.
But I don’t.
Because she means well.
And because part of me is glad she’s never met this kind of haunted.
But if it were just about context,
I would’ve walked free the day she left.
VI. THE SLOWEST RESURRECTION
Healing isn’t a light switch.
It’s not a finish line.
It’s not a goddamn TED Talk.
It’s breath by bloody breath.
It’s staying when everything in you screams vanish.
Some days I rise like I believe it.
Other days I crawl back into the echo.
But I look in the mirror now.
Not with pride.
Not yet.
But with something fiercer than survival:
Defiance.
Because shame has a thousand tongues.
But healing only needs one whisper that says:
Stay.
VII. TO THE ONES WHO STILL SEE GHOSTS IN THE GLASS
If all you see is the break—
look again.
If all you hear is the echo—
stay longer.
The body remembers.
But so does the soul.
And sometimes, memory is the bruise that means you lived through it.
You are not broken.
You are becoming.
You are the ghost and the flame.
The silence and the scream.
You are the echo that chose not to vanish.
And the mirror?
It doesn’t forgive.
But it testifies.
It holds the proof that you were here.
That you endured.
That you chose to stay.
So next time the mirror whispers—
don’t ask who you were.
Ask it who survived.
And if it flinches—
you’ll know the answer was always you.
🛎️ IF THIS WRECKAGE SPOKE TO YOU—
Share it.
Forward it.
Tattoo it on your mirror.
This space is for the ones still healing in silence.
For the ghosts who stayed.
For the ones who survived, but still flinch.
Subscribe below if you want to walk this road with me—
not because it’s clean,
but because it’s true.
And if you already have—thank you.
You’re proof that echo doesn’t mean empty.