The Life I Lived Without Being Chosen

There was a time, 

Embracing grace and humility,  

Embracing trust and traditions, 

When I waited.  

Not loudly, not desperately, 

But with a quiet faith,

That someday, 

I would be seen, understood,  

And chosen.  

I stood within the walls of a life, 

Thickened with what I believed was true love,

A life that looked whole from the outside, 

Held together with quiet anchors, 

Yet unaware,  

Of what was slowly slipping,

 Through unseen cracks.  

Years passed, 

Decades ran like a marathon, 

Not in emptiness, 

But in unknowing effort.  

In believing, 

In giving more chances, 

Than I ever gave myself.  

I did not ask for much. 

Only truth, 

Only presence, 

Only a love that stayed.

 I believed.  

 But what I received, 

A silence dressed as normalcy, 

Distance hidden inside routine,  

And,

 A story that was being lived without me fully in it. 

 And one day, 

Not suddenly, but deeply, 

I understood.  

I was living a life,

 Where I was never truly chosen. 

---

 That realization did not break me.

 It burned.

 It questioned everything I had held sacred. 

It made me stand alone, 

In the middle of years I could not rewrite. 

 But it also did something else. 

It woke me up,

Like a fresh new dawn,

Rising quietly in my life. 

 ---

 I stopped asking, 

“Why wasn’t I enough?”  

And started seeing,

 “I was always enough, 

Just not met with the same truth.”  

I stopped waiting for someone,

 To turn back toward me.  

And slowly, 

I turned toward myself.

 A gentle transformation,  

Transpiring my expectations.

 ---

 There was no dramatic exit.

 No loud declaration. 

Just a quiet shift.

 A step away from pleading,

 With dignity. 

 A step away from longing,

 With self-recognition. 

 A step away from being unseen, 

With becoming visible to myself.

 ---

 I began to gather the pieces,

 I had once set aside,

 My thoughts,

 My voice,

 My dreams that had waited patiently,

 For me to return.

 And I did. 

Not as the woman who was left behind, 

But as the woman,

 Who chose herself forward. 

--- 

Today,

 I do not measure my life,

 By who stayed or who left. 

 I measure it,

 By how I rose.  

By how I turned,

 Pain into expression, 

Silence into words, and  

Waiting into becoming. 

--- 

He never said the words,

 I once hoped to hear. 

 He never understood,

 The depth of what I carried. 

And that is no longer my burden. 

Because my story,

 Does not end, 

With his realization.

 --- 

It continues, 

With my realization and awakening.

 --- 

This is the life I lived,

Without being chosen.  

And this is the life I now live, 

Because I finally chose myself.

Life is lived once,

and I choose to etch it now,

with purpose,

with truth,

and with my own becoming.