Degenerate

I used to carry that word like a curse. It sat in my mouth like something spoiled, something I dared not swallow, but could never spit out. Degenerate. Ruined. Unworthy.

I heard it in the silences that swallowed my voice. In someone else’s rules whispered between the lines—how to assimilate into oblivion—for my very survival.

I felt it in my body. In the way my spine bent under the weight of shame. In the way my breath caught when I reached for something I had not been given permission to want. In the way I learned to apologize for and police my own existence.

To be cast out. To be marked as wrong for the abuses done to me. To be made into something that does not belong.

What they never tell you is that this is where freedom begins.

Betrayal is a doorway. Humiliation is an initiation.

To degenerate is to come undone. To let the version of yourself shaped by terror and alienation decay. To let the shame rot and fall away so that something untamed and unbound can rise in its place.

The world will tell you to hold yourself together at any cost. That breaking is failure. That to unravel is to die. But what if the real sickness is staying bound together with internalized lies? What if healing isn’t in holding on, but in the letting go?

I've learned to kneel at the altar of my own undoing. To let myself split open. To rot. To bloom. To become something the world has no name for.

Degenerate. Ruined. Lost.

I am not afraid to be unmade. I am done betraying myself.

I know what waits on the other side.