​What nearly killed me made me sharper. The tragedy is that the sharpness keeps cutting me. The triumph is within the realisation: I am the wielder.

What nearly killed me made me sharper. The tragedy is that the sharpness keeps cutting me. The triumph is within the realisation: I am the wielder. The mind forged under uncertainty becomes extraordinary at certain things. Reading rooms before you’ve crossed the threshold, the anticipation of what people need before they’ve formed the thought. Transforming chaos into something legible when everyone else is still drowning in it. Staying functional when the foundation is wrecked. These aren’t gifts formed from suffering, they’re the direct output of having to be exceptional just to exist in your life. Which means the wound isn’t just damaging, It becomes transformational. Enabling a relationship with your own history that nobody prepares you for, because you can’t fully grieve it without grieving the instrument itself. You can’t wish it away cleanly, as the sharpness and the suffering share the same origin. The same pattern recognition that reads rooms reads the self – relentlessly, and without permission, without rest. The same capacity that builds frameworks to live by, built the glass wall: the structure that keeps people at a manageable distance, that processes the face of the Other before it can land, that converts raw experience into something it can articulate before feeling it. The instrument turned inward is still the wound. I used to think the work was to become someone who no longer needed the sharpness.Becoming softer and less defended. But that’s not quite right, you cannot return the blade you forged. You can however, learn to direct it. The wielder isn’t someone without wounds. The wielder is someone who knows what they’re carrying well enough that it stops cutting indiscriminately.