I Feel Myself Torrent Direct

"I feel myself torrent," I said again. This time, I didn't whisper. And this time, it wasn't a confession.

It was a fact. Like gravity. Like rain. Like the river that would keep running long after I was gone, and the one that would keep running inside me until I wasn't.

My friend Lena called it a breakdown. My doctor called it "emotional dysregulation" and wrote a prescription for something that came in a teal bottle. But I knew better. This wasn’t breaking. This was melting. The dam I’d spent twenty years building—brick by polite brick, mortar made of "I'm fine" and "don't worry about it"—had cracked along a fault line I hadn't known existed. i feel myself torrent

On the seventh day, the torrent slowed. Not stopped—never that. But slowed enough for me to see the shape of what had been underneath all along. Not a wreck. Not a ruin.

The words came out wrong. They always did. But for the first time, they felt true. "I feel myself torrent," I said again

I stood in front of the bathroom mirror. My hair was a nest. My eyes were red. But for the first time in years, I recognized the person looking back. Not because she was calm. Because she was moving.

The hardest part wasn't the sadness. It was the rage. A hot, stupid, beautiful rage at every person who’d told me to calm down. At every teacher who’d said "too sensitive." At every version of myself who’d smiled and nodded and drowned a little more. It was a fact

I screamed into a pillow until my throat bled. I wrote letters I’d never send, filled with words I’d never speak. I tore a photograph in half—not out of spite, but out of honesty. That person wasn't me anymore. That person had been standing still while the river rose around her knees, pretending she wasn't getting wet.