self discovery – Freegrandmaa

October 11, 2026

The Illusion of Going Somewhere

I like to run. Literally, metaphorically. I like the illusion of going somewhere and the reality of going nowhere.

I’ve been running away since early adolescence. My soul can breathe with even just the idea of distance. I feel the most free. I can think and say and feel the silence. There are no expectations of me. I don’t need to be anything. Being somewhere isn’t a concern.

The emptiness fills me with potential. I wonder who else I can be. I don’t care about where I’m going or actually becoming that person. My imagination is enough. When I run, my body loosens, my spirit sings and rejoices. I notice everything. I can listen and hear.

The idea of a clean slate, reinventing myself but staying the same. I need to believe that I can get away. I need to know I’m not trapped. That I can disappear and come back on my own time, when I’m ready. Throw myself to the wind any time I like. That I am a free woman, that I belong to me. That I’m not bound to the words used to describe me, to who I was in familiar places. I am constantly changing.

I want to be unpredictable. I want people to wonder and experience irritation with me. I get off on revealing their own insecurities. I find it pleasurable to be irresponsible. I look back fondly on the times when I didn’t care about anything but what I wanted to care about. I had no obligations. There’s a freedom in not caring about approval or being understood.

Who do I think I am? She doesn’t belong here.

I want to leave them. I want curiosity more than I want to be known. I love feeling me, being the most familiar, the most connected. Being alone and in myself. Society doesn’t compliment me like solitude does.

I like to run and feel my body, to feel my power, my fight. It reminds me that I can survive if I wanted to. That I can betray myself if I wanted to. I can conquer myself if I want to. Be my own master.

Maybe I need to know that I can get away.

I’m not in a good headspace.

I allow myself to crawl my consciousness into the small spaces. Spaces filled with sorrow, fear, pain, all the bad things I’ve grown to enjoy. I can easily get trapped in there. It can become a womb.

Fuel for my creativity as I express these intense experiences. As I sob over distant family, of the confusion of a lover. I want to feel heavy, grounded. Rooted in something.

This lingering is ancestral. It lasts for as long as it needs to.

This is where I am. A space where all my unpleasant memories play. Where my wickedness shamelessly starts to show. Where I know better but don’t do better. Spaces I can replay, curl up in, and cry. For days, I’ll have crying spells. I feel heavy, like I can’t breathe.

I want to starve myself of what sustains me. I want to be a sinful person. Give up.

I don’t need to be fixed. I don’t think there’s a solution. I just need someone to be there for me through it.

I rock myself back and forth, attempting to soothe me. I’m on the verge of tears.

August 13, 2026August 14, 2026

February 3, 2026

When I imagine being harmlessly dominated, the first thing I feel is a sense of safety. To be controlled, to willingly relinquish control. I feel excitement and thrill to be powerless, weaker than.

My whole life I’ve had to manage, lead, be the bigger person, exercise wisdoms, discipline. I’ve had to parent my parents, friends, lovers, my son, myself.

I want to be a child but it’s all over.

A child with little to no choice, not a care, simply existing.

My childhood was severed.

I remember when I decided to place the burden upon myself. Tending to my father and his ocean of emotions. Suppressing my sadness to make room and hold his. I was in charge of how he felt, and when he was in pain it was my obligation to make him feel better.

It was an emotional rollercoaster I was born to ride, I suppose.

I was born in his boiling waters, birthed onto the old pavement painted by our bloodline.

Lost without.

I grew up and hit a point where control gave me comfort. I quickly realized I couldn’t control the world outside of me. So I hyperfixated on controlling myself.

I gave myself rules, an underdeveloped idea of structure. I studied and sorted through the labyrinth of my being.

I think this, paired with me choosing similar lovers, kept me silent. Holding their emotions. Holding, healing, tending.

I saw my dad in them all, so it was natural.

They are my shadow, opposite, docile, timid. I’m protective over them. They let me choose. They let me go and take me back.

Unfortunately, the damage is an open wound as a result of all the sacrifice.

I don’t let people hold me.

I don’t trust trust.

I don’t trust care.

All of my moves are calculated. I think it all through to make sense. I feel things out, follow each path out in my mind.

I don’t like surprises and not knowing. I need mental preparation.

I won’t let myself fall, or will I never put my guard down or go wild in the arms of another?

Only alone do I surrender.

Surrender could look like placing my heart back on my sleeve.

Maybe I’d become an emotional drunk, embrace being a femme fatale.

Maybe I won’t have any friends.

Maybe I’d detach and float away and up.

I’d be sad and heavyhearted all the time.

I’d cry. Wail. Beg.

It’s a slippery slope.

I fear I must stay tense or I’ll lose myself entirely.

Whatever that means.

If I lose myself and become other—was I even me?

My whole being is tired of being in control.

I asked him if he wanted to know about my day.

He said he did, as he was intrigued by me.

I sat silent and changed the subject.

I’m not so good at sharing me.

August 11, 2026August 14, 2026

August 11, 2026

X is the first man that doesn’t remind me of my daddy in the emotional aspect.

He’s opposite.

Steady. Emotionally present. Clear.

He’s what I have been to others.

I find myself, though, embarrassed by the support.

When I shut down, he takes his time opening me up. Using his words and tender tone, warm body language. He lets me know that it’s us vs. the issue.

He leads me through conclusion after conclusion until I arrive at the one that suits me, and because of this, it suits us.

I don’t have to read into anything. He’s loud, and so I am able to sit back and notice.

His influence is subtle, and he’s right there for comfort as I walk through it.

His goal is to open me up and soften me, let me experience safeness through him.

But it’s terrifying, loosening up.

I’m afraid of that man.

The way his softness softens me, and I can’t help it.

I can’t help but lean toward him.

His understanding lowers my defenses, chips away at my walls.

I feel pulled to be vulnerable and am full of regret.

I can’t help myself.

Nothing is working as I try to form distance.

There’s words and connections and ways of being to soothe each wrinkle.

He wants me to feel safe. Genuinely wants to.

But I cry myself to sleep as my fate comes true.

I am losing myself.

Who I thought I was.

The mask that I wore.

In this space I am peeling. I am forgetting my past. I am losing touch with it.

This experience is destabilizing me.

As I let go of what I was and ease into what I’m becoming, it’s like I’m being led somewhere and everyone else knows where I’m going but me.

And I recognize nothing.

And no one.

And sometimes it all just looks like me.

And I don’t know what to do with this feeling.

Except somehow try to feel good about it all.

Somehow convince myself I am safe within it.

That I’m not dying.

I don’t feel like me when I miss him within the same day.

When I take his advice because it works for me.

When I let him do for me.

When I move to melt a bit.

When he experiences things about myself that scare others off and still adores me.

I don’t feel like me when I confess willingly.

When I want to spend time.

When I cook for and with him.

July 25, 2025August 4, 2025

The Alchemy of Ache: Poetry as Portal, Memory as Ritual, Writing as Survival

I sometimes peel myself for fun
forgetting I am dripping

I devour this holy pomegranate
for my last meal

While the world makes love
to cope with flesh
I vow to touch the earth
with the courtesy of life in mind

Through every door
every portal
I walk
fall
burn

and come back
to myself
again
and again

– Freegrandmaa

—

I’ve never been a tidy writer. I don’t write from outlines. I don’t plan.
Because pain rarely makes sense while you’re inside it. Because memory doesn’t arrive in full sentences. Because healing isn’t clean. And neither is truth.

My hands have always been frantic, scratching, scribbling, collaging, bleeding. Before I had language for what I was feeling, I had survival instinct. My chaos moved through my fingers. I drew. I cut. I self-harmed. I wrote. It wasn’t for performance. It was so I wouldn’t drown.

When I finally found poetry, it didn’t feel like art. It felt like company.

I remember sitting alone by a stream in Ohio. I had followed a lover to a place where no one wanted me. Not him, not my family. Isolation cracked me open. Trauma rose in the silence like smoke. I was drowning in rejection, misunderstood and invisible, waiting to feel like someone again.

That’s when the butterfly showed up. It lingered. It saw me. It didn’t save me, but it stayed long enough to let me feel seen. And in that moment, the words came like a river. Unfiltered, unconscious, mythic. The poem didn’t try to make sense. It just felt real. And for the first time in a long time, I felt real too.

I don’t write logically. I write neurologically. I write like the body remembers. Trauma doesn’t give you stories, it gives you sensations. The brain breaks memory into fragments. You remember a sound, a flinch, a smell. Not a plot.

My poetry mirrors that. That’s why my lines come in flashes. Why my metaphors feel mythic. Why there’s no narrative arc, only spirals, symbols, sobs, silences.

Writing that follows the rhythm of memory, not structure. Writing that reveals the subconscious, not logic. Writing that bleeds in a language the nervous system can trust. I didn’t learn this. I survived into it.

I am what I call an underworld translator, a shadow scribe, a nervous system medium.
I write from inside the burn.. I speak from the parts of the self most people try to avoid. The underworld is not hell, it’s the unspoken. The grief you buried. The version of yourself that exists beneath the mask. The shadow self waiting not to haunt, but to be integrated.

Sometimes, I wonder if I’m just romanticizing it all. If shadow work is just another addiction. If I’m still self-harming, but this time with metaphors. If I’m scripting pain to feel in control.

But this is also true: there is no light without this walk. There is no peace without knowing what almost destroyed you. And writing is how I know the difference. If I let it be ugly, feral, fragmented, then I know I’m not hiding anymore.

Because when you don’t face your underworld, it doesn’t disappear, it mutates. Into numbness. Into avoidance. Into loneliness. Into cruelty. It passes down. What you refuse to integrate, your children inherit.

I write because I didn’t