People talk about childhood like it’s a country we all come from.
Treehouses. Laughter. Skinned knees.
Bedtime stories. Bike rides.
Memory filtered through safety.
I didn’t come from there.
I came from cupboards.
Dark.
Cramped.
Quiet.
Not the kind of quiet that soothes—
the kind that swallows.
There’s a door I still dream about.
I know every grain of the wood.
The chipped white paint.
The way the light from the hallway cut underneath but never quite reached me.
That was the first place I learned how to disappear.
I didn’t cry to be dramatic.
I screamed because I was afraid.
And the worst part?
No one came.
That silence did something to me.
It shaped the way I listen.
It taught me that love could be conditional.
That attention was a negotiation.
That pain didn’t mean rescue.
It meant endurance.
I wasn’t taught how to speak through emotion.
I was taught how to choke it down and come out grinning.
The boy I was back then—
he still flinches when a door clicks shut.
People ask why I became chaotic.
Why I built things too fast.
Loved too hard.
Broke too suddenly.
It’s because when you grow up believing you’re replaceable,
you learn to overcompensate.
You learn to perform.
You learn to build before you’re ready –
because you might not get another chance.
What they got wrong is thinking I’m dramatic.
I’m not.
I’m a survivor of environments that never made room for softness.
You don’t walk out of a cupboard and instantly trust the world.
You walk out suspicious.
Hungry.
Needing to be seen but terrified of it at the same time.
And then you start shaping a life around that contradiction.
A life that looks bold but trembles when the applause stops.
I’m not here to relive the trauma.
I’m here to name it.
Because what we name we can own.
And what we own doesn’t own us.
I grew up in cupboards.
But I don’t live in them anymore.
I write from the open now.
I sing in the light.
I am still haunted—
but no longer hidden.