I stared at the card long after the joke had faded, tracing each tidy word like it might suddenly rearrange itself into something truer. It was strange, realizing how quickly I’d tried to shrink myself to fit inside a sentence. Stranger still to notice how much of me spilled out around its edges—memories, fears, small acts of courage I never named as such. The more I thought about it, the more those contradictions felt less like evidence that I was broken and more like proof that I was alive.
So I left the card where it was, not as a verdict, but as a reminder to keep watching myself in motion. To notice when I soften instead of shut down, when I stay instead of run. The tension I carried didn’t vanish, but it loosened, making room for a quieter truth: I am not meant to be solved, only known.
