Armor Laced in Lullabies

I was sifting through some of my older writing the other day when something in me snagged on a thread I didn’t realize had been there all along. It wasn’t one particular line or memory, just this aching awareness blooming in the silence between words. I don’t remember when the metaphors began to take over. I can’t trace it back to a single moment, like a light switch flipping on. There was no dramatic shift, no conscious decision to start cloaking my sorrow in poetry. It just sort of happened. Like ivy growing through the cracks. Like water slowly rising until I had no choice but to learn how to breathe beneath it. Somewhere along the way, my pain learned to speak in euphemisms, because plain speech simply couldn’t hold the weight. Because the truth, in its bare and bloodied form, was too dangerous to lay down raw. So I dressed it in imagery. Not because I wanted to be poetic. Because I needed to in order to survive.

Looking back, I think it was always there, just quieter. Like a tremor under the surface, a hum beneath the skin. A language my bones spoke long before I could translate it. But somewhere along the way, it got louder. The ache of being unseen sharpened into something unbearable, and I started painting my wounds in colors I hoped someone else could finally recognize. The more I was told to shrink, to soften, to smile through the shattering… the more I felt the need to wrap my truth in metaphor. I turned pain into poetry, not because it made it prettier, but because it made it possible to say out loud. I cloaked the devastation in silk, starlight, and storm clouds, because maybe if I made it beautiful enough, someone would finally stay long enough to really look.
It wasn’t craft. It wasn’t calculated. It was instinct. It was survival. It is survival.

And still, I wonder… is it also just another form of hiding?

Is the poetry just a softer kind of shield, armor laced in lullabies? A way to still whisper what I’m too afraid to scream? Maybe every metaphor is a veil I slip over the truth, hoping no one notices how raw it really is beneath the lace. Maybe I’ve learned to dress my grief in beauty so it doesn’t scare people off. Maybe I’ve become fluent in symbolic language because the real thing - the unfiltered, unpoetic version of my pain, has always been met with silence, or worse… discomfort. So I twist it into something easier. Something that sounds like art instead of agony. And maybe that’s not cowardice. Maybe it’s mercy. Maybe survival sometimes looks like turning your scream into a song because that’s the only way the world will listen. Maybe we all have a right to speak in the language that keeps us breathing, even if it’s written in disguise.

Because for me, this is the only way I know how to survive. The ache doesn’t stay silent, it shape shifts into images. The grief sprouts wings and tries to fly its way out of me. The sorrow leaks from my fingertips like ink, staining every page with what I can never say out loud. What I never could before and never will have the nerve to. Even if no one ever reads a single word, my mind still waltzes with language like it’s the only thread keeping me from unraveling completely. Maybe it’s my way of giving the ache a purpose, turning the ruins into cathedrals and the sorrow into stained glass.

I don’t know what it says about me that I have to dress my pain in poetry before I can lay it down and walk away. That I need to carve beauty out of the wreckage just to make it bearable. Maybe it means I really am still trying to make something holy out of all the things that nearly destroyed me. Maybe it’s my way of honoring the ache, of giving reverence to the things that shattered me, instead of pretending they didn’t matter. In some strange, backwards, bone deep way, I think it’s how I pay tribute to my pain. Like if I can wrap it in reverence, maybe it won’t feel so wasted. Maybe it will mean something more as art. Even the people who caused it, especially them. I find myself writing elegies for their absence, offering tenderness to the very hands that let me fall. And the moments that still cut like glass? I hold them like sacred artifacts, turning them over in the light, searching for some glimmer I might’ve missed. Because unfortunately, that’s who I am. Even when I’m bleeding, I reach for softness. I reach for beauty. I keep trying to trace light into the shape of what broke me. Keep trying to find poetry in the person who couldn’t choose me. It's not forgiveness, exactly. It’s just… the only way I know how to survive without going numb.

Maybe it’s foolish. Maybe it’s grace. Maybe it’s the most tragic kind of hope to keep romanticizing the wreckage just so it hurts a little less. Maybe it’s both. But either way, I’ve stopped apologizing for it. This is the way my soul knows how to speak. This is how I keep breathing when the air is thick with memory. It’s not always pretty, but it’s mine, this survival stitched from syllables, this fragile peace built from metaphor and marrow. Or maybe it’s simpler than that. Maybe this is just how I breathe, through metaphor, through melody, through shaping the unbearable into something almost beautiful. Like Romeo and Juliet, whose story is soaked in heartbreak and blood, yet lives forever in the language of poetry and passion. Their tragedy isn’t just pain; it’s a sacred dance of light and shadow, love and loss woven into verses that echo across centuries. In that way, sorrow becomes something more than just suffering, it becomes a story that can be held, a grief that sings instead of screams. My own pain finds its rhythm and meaning not when it’s raw and fractured, but when it’s wrapped in metaphor, given a voice that can be heard without shattering the listener. This is how I survive: by turning my wounds into something that sings, something that holds a strange kind of grace even in its ache.

And for now, that’s enough.

So here I am, still wrapped in metaphor, still painting my pain in colors that almost glow. Not because I want to hide behind my pages, but because this is how I breathe. This is how I stay alive when the rawness threatens to swallow me whole. Maybe it’s not perfect. Maybe it’s not even “healthy” by some measure. But it’s mine, the only thing I’ve never had to share with a soul. It’s mine alone, a secret sanctuary no one else has to enter or even understand. A place where my pain can exist without judgment, without explanation. My language, my lifeline. Because in the end, these metaphors are more than just words, they are the threads holding my broken heart together, the light spilling out from the cracks. And maybe, that could be enough. No, it has to be enough.

I’ve made peace with letting the metaphors lead. Letting the imagery drive the story when my voice feels too naked on its own. If hiding behind beauty is the only way I get to speak, then let the lace and lightning shield me. Let the softness carry the scream. Because If you ever cut me open, you wouldn’t find blood. You’d find letters… feral, unfiltered language pulsing with everything I never said out loud. I’d bleed unfinished sentences and half-formed truths, starlight steeped in sorrow, lullabies no one’s ever dared to sing but me. Ink would spill from my veins like a confession, dark and relentless. And every drop would echo the ache of a story that was never safe to speak so it found its way out the only way it could.

So if all of this… every metaphor, every image, every bleeding line is just a long, winding way of saying I’m still here, then let it be that. Let it be the evidence that I existed. Let it be the heartbeat beneath the poetry. Because maybe I’ll never know how to hand someone my pain without first wrapping it in something beautiful. Maybe I’ll never stop softening the blade before I speak. But even if the world never reads a word of it, even if no one ever truly sees what I’ve buried between the lines, I will know. I will know that I didn’t go silent. That I didn’t vanish beneath the weight of everything I couldn’t say. I turned it into something. I built something sacred from the ache. And in a world that demands silence from those who feel too deeply, maybe that is the loudest, bravest thing I’ve ever done.


Author’s note:
Originally written October 11, 2017: How I survive by turning pain into poetry.

I wrote this particular piece after losing three people I loved. I was drowning in a grief so thick it didn’t have edges, and writing became the only way I could keep myself from disappearing inside it. I remember rereading some of my older posts, searching for something, I think. Maybe clarity. Maybe closure. Maybe just memories from the ones I love and lost. But I realized instead that even in the pieces where I swore I was being honest, where I believed I was spilling everything raw and ugly onto the page, I still dressed the truth up in metaphors. Still softened the edges with poetry. Still draped the pain in lace so it wouldn’t look so violent. I thought I was writing plainly, but even then, I was braiding grief into something almost poetically beautiful.

Metaphors were my song and my dance, my way of moving through the ache without collapsing under the weight of it. Every line in this piece is a breadcrumb from a version of me who didn’t know how to keep going, but did anyway.

Reading it now, I can still feel the weight of what I was carrying. But something has shifted. I still recognize her, that girl cloaked in poetry, pain reverberating beneath every sentence. But I’m not her anymore. I still write this way, but not because I have to. Not because I’m unraveling. These days, it’s less about survival and more about reverence. I’ve found peace in my chaos. More than that, I’ve found a place that lets me show up unfiltered and stripped down, without needing to translate myself first. A love that meets me exactly where I am and chooses to stay. There’s something holy about that. Something healing. The kind of healing that doesn’t demand I turn my pain into art just to make it agreeable. The kind that sees the mess in its rawest form and calls it worthy anyway. That love has taught me there is strength in being soft and beauty in speaking plainly and that I don’t have to bleed poetry to be held.
I’ve learned to breathe without bleeding ink just to prove I’m alive.

But I’ll never stop loving the version of me who survived this way. Who made art out of agony. Who sang her story softly so it wouldn’t scare anyone away. She’s why I’m still here. And she’s the reason my voice finally feels like home.

I still write in metaphors, still find beauty in sorrow, but not because I need it to survive. Not anymore. I’ve made peace with the chaos. I’ve found breath where there used to be only silence.

This piece is a tribute to the girl who used poetry as armor, as a lifeline, as language when there were no words strong enough. She didn’t write to be read. She wrote to stay alive.

And because of her, I did.