Unlearning His Voice Poem by Reena Marie

For ten years, I swallowed his words whole—
bitter pills that dissolved into my bloodstream,
became the voice that woke me each morning,
whispering I was nothing, would be nothing.

His sentences like hammers,
my self-worth the nail,
driven deeper with each swing,
until I believed the foundation
was meant to crack.

I learned to move like a ghost
through my own home,
to calculate the creak of floorboards,
to measure my breath against his mood,
to make myself small enough
to slip through the cracks of his anger.

They say a child's mind is a sponge.
Mine absorbed acid
and called it normal,
called it deserved,
called it home.

The first time I recognized his voice in my head,
it wore my own face in the mirror.
'Worthless, ' it said in my tone,
and I realized he had built a room
inside me to live in forever.

But wounds can become doors.
One day, I walked through mine.

The unlearning began slowly—
extracting splinters of his language
from beneath my skin,
scrubbing the residue of his judgments
from the walls of my mind,
rewiring the circuits
that sparked with his criticisms.

I grew taller than his shadow.
I learned to speak in my own voice.
I claimed rooms in myself
he never knew existed.

Today, when his words surface,
I recognize them as artifacts,
not truth.
I handle them with gloves,
examine their poison,
then place them carefully
in a museum of things
that no longer define me.

I am not what was done to me.
I am what I choose to become
despite it.
The masterpiece that survived
the one who tried
to break it.