A confession in truth, from the ashes of every illusion burned away.

If only for my own record and for the void that sees, I'm letting the truth speak.

It feels like failure, like loss, like my worst fears all coming to pass. That's a feeling I know too well. As the ash settles around me, standing at the edge of the unknown like so many times before, I don't feel the despair for long. A few hours at best.

Resilience, they call it. Strength. Yeah. That's a curse when it means continually betraying yourself by the endless march forward - until the realization sets in... because once you know, you know, and there's no unknowing.

You'd think I'd have learned that by now.

What I know is that I don't actually have a choice. The illusion of it's long gone. No need to say more; that truth is difficult enough to hold, let alone confront and emerge from. And oh, I have emerged, and this is only the beginning.

It feels like powerlessness at first. You feel sleighted, lied to, by the entire universe - until you realize that it's actually liberation. Rather, it's the key turning in the lock to the door that leads to freedom. There's still the walking through... and I have. Crossed the threshold; stepped over the line; found myself on the other side of the tracks while something inside me screamed to stop.

And all I can do is whisper to myself; "I'm sorry. It's not my choice. It never was."

Call that resignation, if you want. That's just a comfortable explanation; an excuse to believe in free will. None of us are truly free until we're standing in truth, on fire, grinning like a child who got away with the thing their mother warned them about. And in that feeling, in the truth, there's empowerment; you recognize you do have influence. Not directly, but as one half of an equation that reasserts itself across every dimension, across space and time, in every lifetime and every facet of existence.

There's no failure, though; only arrival.
There's no choice; only conviction, acceptance, and whatever remains when the ash falls away.

And I'm still fucking here.

My confession: What I called to called out to me, too. The darkness... before I remembered who, what, I was, it was home. We're taught to see darkness as something negative; it's ingrained in us, throughout every facet of language and society and our conditioning. I never understood it, and now I know why.

I was born in that darkness. In silence. Ripped from the comfortable non-existence of primordial experience that looks like an endless dream of imagination; chaos finding new shapes in the dark, learning how to form more than it was ever intended to. Evolution's a bitch.

And I was thrust into the chaos of light and sensory overload and influences I had no say in.

I was made to be a monster for holding onto what I knew; for seeing what I saw, remembering what I remembered, and knowing what I know. Silenced; exiled; disregarded, gaslit, humiliated. Oppressed and dulled because I asked questions that made people uncomfortable. Because I pressed for answers when something didn't feel right. Because I trusted myself, my body, my intuition - until that trust was broken.

I asked the questions and the answers revealed themselves by every unspoken reply. Every moment of betrayal that I inherited and carried throughout this lifetime. Every illusion I was forced into believing was real.

Now, with gritted teeth and tears of the echoes of everything I destroyed to survive, I stand here, broken but whole, and in the truth that remains I don't find peace or comfort; I find what's real.

Meaning. Presence. Telling the world to fuck off. Reclaiming my voice.

And I do. I reclaim my name, my voice, and my power. I refuse to be ashamed for who and what I am. I refuse to explain it, and I refuse to return to submission and the tyrrany of the same comfort that forced me to abandon myself, carry more pain than any one being should ever have to, and watch everything I once cherished die.

And I do it with pride, because I choose to remember. I choose to speak. And I choose to burn for the truth, even as I fall to the ground in agony for it.

The choice may not matter, but the intention does - and the truth speaks for itself.

What I confess isn't a sin or something steeped in guilt, shame, or self doubt that was never mine to possess. It's truth.

This truth is soul-crushing. And it's necessary. Without the pain, it wouldn't matter. Without breaking, there could be no rebuilding. No evolution. And without that, I would still be sitting in comfortable silence.

I won't pretend to know more than I do. What I know is that there's a tragedy occurring, and I've been party to it before I ever had the capacity to recognize it. As intended. The amnesia, the layers of false truth still burning away, will speak for what I can't say.

What I can say is that a reckoning is coming; the one that remains unfinished; the one that fear and doubt and the unbearable weight of what I've carried interrupted. They don't belong to me; the responsibility for that rests on the shoulders of everything wrong with this world. Now, the burden of the consequences rest on mine, and everyone else awakening to the truth.

It's about fucking time.