There are days I think about how much of my life I spent trying to make sense to other people.

Trying to explain the fire without showing the burns. Trying to tell the story in a way that wouldn’t make them look away.

And the trouble is, once you get good at that, once you learn how to soften the blade, how to make your grief sound poetic, people stop asking what it actually felt like. They don’t want the real story. They want the one they can applaud at the end.

But that’s not the one I came to tell.

I wasn’t born easily and I didn’t come here in comfort. I didn’t come with my hands clasped in prayer and my voice polished. I came with the silence of men who were never asked what a cruel world had torn from them. I came with a boy’s voice still breaking from all the times it wasn’t safe to speak. I came with the fury that lives in a man who learned how to survive by swallowing more than his own sorrow.

And I’ll be honest with you, it’s taken most of my life to see it.

To understand that I am not difficult. I am not broken in a way that needs fixing.

I am simply tired of being turned into a lesson for people who never cared to hear the truth. And the truth is uncomfortable, some of us were never meant to be understood. We were meant to be remembered.

Not for how well we explained ourselves, but for how honestly we stood in crowds that did not know what to do with us. You learn, eventually, that making yourself legible to people who never learned your way of speaking is not kindness.

It’s disappearance.

So now, I say it.

I am not here to be understood.

Not in the way the world demands. Not in the way that makes my pain palatable and my story convenient. If I speak now, it’s not because I need validation. It’s because my truth still matters to me. Even when no one claps for it. And my truth is not a performance. It is not an invitation for dissection. It is a fire. And it will not quench itself to make itself praised.

So if you are here, truly here, then sit with me in it.

You don’t have to understand every word.

You just have to stop asking me to disappear inside them.