In the Quiet Hours: A Life Becoming | Creative Essays on Growth and Healing

Sometimes, the only proof that I'm growing

is that I no longer build altars to old arguments.

No longer carving explanations with bloody fingerprints

into stone for people who brought knives to peaceful conversations.

No longer stitching apologies into the hems of dreams

that were never meant to be hidden, tapered, or altered.

I spent a long time trying to plant gardens in borrowed soil —

where every bloom was questioned,

where every harvest was held up to the sun and found wanting,

where the rain came heavy, but the roots were never fed.

There’s a loneliness in realizing

that some hands that clapped for you

were only measuring the distance between your rise and their comfort.

I used to build bridges out of my own ribs just to be understood.

I used to tuck my victories into smaller and smaller pockets,

worried that joy would weigh too heavy in the wrong hands.

But growth has its own quiet language.

The rustle of worn journals stacking themselves like bricks.

The rhythmic hum of laptop keys working until dawn.

The steady hands of a woman weaving a life

she doesn’t have to apologize for wearing.

Some nights, I feel wild born —

breaking out of a carefully drawn map.

Some nights, I feel fifteen again —

spinning dreams into the ceiling fan’s slow circles, reckless and sure.

Some nights, I feel everything —

the daughter, the mother, the maker,

the builder, the breaker, the builder again.

I feel like breath you forgot you were holding.

Like prayers without language.

Like the book you’ve been writing

in the margins of every ordinary day.

Not perfect.

Not polished.

But real.

Alive.

Becoming.

I don't have to make myself smaller to be welcome.

I don’t have to explain the architecture of my own joy.

I am worthy of the feast and the flight.

Worthy of the seat and the sky.

And if you're here —still decoding the music behind your own noise,

still building castles out of broken things,

still daring to believe that becoming is its own reward —

then you belong here too.

In the Quiet Hours is a living collection — essays, stories, and poems stitched from the quiet work of becoming. Maybe someday it will become a book. For now, it's a home for the pieces that refuse to wait.

 In love,