PROMPT #450

Here are two images for you to ponder on.

Reena’s Xploration Challenge #450

The Day I Stopped Obeying

I knew that word long before
I understood what it was doing to me.

Obey.

Be good.

Be quiet.

Don’t answer back.

Don’t make trouble.

Keep the peace.

Know your place.

Different words.

Same instruction.

Growing up, I learned how to read a room
before I learned how to challenge one.

I learned when silence was safer.

I learned how quickly another person’s mood
could change the temperature of a home.

I learned to make myself smaller
without anyone ever measuring me.

Later, some of those lessons
followed me into my first marriage.

Perhaps that is the cruel thing
about what we learn in childhood.

We can mistake familiarity
for normality.

We can recognise a cage
and call it home
because we have seen its bars before.

So I endured.

I adapted.

I apologised.

I tried harder.

I kept peace that was never really peace
because peace purchased with your own silence
costs too much.

And somewhere underneath it all
was still me.

She hadn’t disappeared.

She was waiting.

Waiting beneath the fear.

Beneath the expectations.

Beneath every version of myself
I had created simply to survive.

Until eventually,

No.

Such a tiny word.

Two letters.

No speech.

No revolution.

No permission required.

Just—

No.

And something cracked.

Not me.

The cage.

I wish I could say freedom arrived
in one magnificent moment.

It didn’t.

Freedom had to be learned too.

I had to learn that having an opinion
was not disrespect.

That boundaries were not cruelty.

That another person’s anger
did not automatically make me wrong.

That love should never require
the disappearance of the person being loved.

And perhaps hardest of all,

I had to learn that I did not need
to apologise for taking up space.

When I look at the woman in this image,
I don’t see someone beginning a fight.

I see someone ending one.

The long fight between who she was told to be
and who she knows herself to be.

Her foot is coming down on OBEY.

Mine did too.

Not all at once.

Not without scars.

But eventually I understood:

I had spent enough of my life
learning how to survive other people’s rules.

The rest of it
would be spent learning
how to live by my own.

And I have never regretted
that first, quiet—

No.

💜

💜

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With love, coffee, poetry, and stardust,

— Maggie The Afterlove Voice 💫

DJ Maggie in the house

https://ditto.fm/arena-51-the-calima-conspiracy-original-mix

https://ditto.fm/arena-51-the-calima-conspiracy-alien-invasion-remix

My song “Silenced,But not broken ” is out on streaming platforms.

Lyrics video :

https://ditto.fm/silenced-but-not-broken

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If you want a reading, send me an email:

Afterlove-Voice@hotmail.com

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