monster

A poem about identity, pain, and refusing to be defined by suffering

You’ll be fine.
Not because the world softens—
hell no—
but because you finally quit mistaking pain
for a name you were meant to answer to.

You used to carry it like a badge,
turning your wounds so the light hit them right,
waiting for someone to nod,
to say yes, that looks real enough to keep.
People do that when they don’t know who they are—
they hold up the suffering first,
as if it’s the closest thing they’ve got
to a biography.

But one morning came,
gray and stupid,
the kind of dawn that doesn’t care
if you rise or rot,
and something in you saw the truth:
the pain wasn’t mystical.
It wasn’t divine.
It was just noise—
a busted hinge screaming at every passing hour.

You looked it in the face
and it faltered.
Every monster does
when you stop feeding it.
Turns out the great, terrible weight
was mostly bark,
and you’d been bowing to it
out of habit.

Life hasn’t gotten easier since then.
The days still come at you like hired men.
Bills like threats shoved under the door.
People lying with the confidence of saints.
The whole damn world
leaning on your shoulders
because you forgot to duck.

But now you don’t kneel.
You don’t polish your sorrow.
You don’t parade it around like a relic.
You just keep going—
steady, hard-edged,
with that strange new humor
that blooms in a man
who’s finally stopped negotiating with his wounds.

You’ll be fine.
Not because the pain is gone—
but because it no longer tells you
who you are.

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More soon.

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