There’s a kind of silence no one warns you about.
It doesn’t come from trauma.
It comes after it.
When the headlines fade.
When the messages stop.
When even the hate gets quiet.
And all that’s left is you,
and the wreckage of your name.
I’ve survived things people don’t walk away from.
Childhood that taught me to disappear.
Foster homes that taught me to perform.
Love that taught me to beg.
Courts that taught me to own the damage I caused.
Public humiliation that stripped everything else.
I survived.
But what they don’t tell you is—
survival doesn’t guarantee voice.
Sometimes it just gives you a quieter cage.
I’ve had to sit in silence that wasn’t healing.
The kind that felt like exile.
The kind where people whisper about you but never to you.
Where the world tells your story for you—
and all you’re allowed to do is nod,
or disappear.
But I didn’t survive for that.
I didn’t survive abuse, abandonment, addiction, and outrage
just to be a punchline they got bored of.
What they got wrong is thinking my silence was acceptance.
It wasn’t.
It was grief.
It was strategy.
It was fear.
Because when you speak too soon, they call it self-pity.
When you speak too late, they say you’re irrelevant.
When you speak at all, they say—
“Why is he still trying?”
But this isn’t a comeback.
This is the sound of someone reclaiming breath.
I’m not asking to be forgiven.
I’m asking to be felt—
in the places that matter.
In the places where myth lives.
Where wounds are remembered with reverence, not ridicule.
I didn’t crawl out of hell just to stay quiet.
I didn’t survive shame to pretend it never shaped me.
And I sure as hell didn’t make it through all of this
to be muted by people who never knew the full song.
I will speak.
Through letters.
Through verses.
Through fire.
Because silence is how they kept me afraid.
And I am not afraid anymore.