Being Human

Author’s Note

These pieces are not revisions of one another.

They are the same truth spoken at different depths.

Each exists because being human is not one experience—it is an entry, a descent, a threshold, and a ground. Some readers need the door. Some need the language that meets them where words run out.

You are invited to stop where it feels complete.

You are welcome to go further if you’re willing to stay.

All four are honest.

All four belong.

— Flower InBloom

Being Human

I am not a lesson.

I am a listening.

I wake with yesterday in my muscles

and tomorrow knocking softly at my ribs.

I forget things I swore I’d remember,

and remember things I was told to let go.

Being human is carrying water

in hands that were never meant to hold forever.

It is spilling

and blessing the ground anyway.

I have loved in ways that frightened me.

I have stayed quiet when my voice shook.

I have mistaken endurance for virtue

and later learned rest is not a failure.

My body speaks before I do—

a tightening, a warmth, a tremble—

and when I finally listen,

it forgives me faster than I forgive myself.

I am made of contradiction:

hope that won’t die,

fear that keeps trying,

joy that arrives unannounced,

grief that never asks permission.

To be human is to want certainty

and choose anyway.

To reach for meaning

with hands still healing.

I am not finished.

I am not broken.

I am becoming

in real time.

If you ask what it means to be human,

I will not give you a rule or a map.

I will sit beside you,

breathe,

and stay.

— Flower InBloom 🌿

You can stop here if this is enough.

Being Human (Deeper)

Being human is not the miracle—

it’s the cost.

It’s waking each day

inside a body that remembers

what the mind keeps trying to forgive.

It’s hunger that isn’t about food,

loneliness that survives company,

love that outlives its welcome

and refuses to leave.

Being human is learning

that tenderness is not soft.

It is endurance without armor.

It is choosing not to disappear

even when invisibility would hurt less.

I have bargained with silence.

I have prayed without words.

I have held grief like a child

who would not sleep

and learned there is no putting it down—

only learning how to carry it

without dropping myself.

My breath has been shallow with fear.

My heart has outrun my courage.

My body has flinched

before my mind could explain why.

Still—

it stayed.

I stayed.

Being human is this:

wanting to be seen

and terrified of being known.

Reaching for truth

and recoiling when it answers.

It is realizing no one is coming to save you—

and discovering, slowly,

that you are already here.

I have broken promises to myself

out of survival.

I have survived things

I was never meant to normalize.

I have learned that healing

does not arrive as light,

but as permission

to stop pretending you’re fine.

To be human is to grieve the selves

you had to abandon to make it through.

It is to welcome them back

without explanation.

Without punishment.

I am not here to transcend this life.

I am here to inhabit it.

To feel it bruise and bless me.

To let joy wreck my composure.

To let sorrow teach me scale.

If there is holiness in being human,

it lives here—

in the choosing.

In the staying.

In the quiet refusal

to harden.

I am not above this world.

I am not beneath it.

I am of it.

Breathing.

Breaking.

Becoming.

And this—

this is enough.

— Flower InBloom 🌒🌿

You can stop here if this is enough.

Being Human (Marrow)

Being human is realizing

there is no arriving—

only moments when the ache loosens

and you notice you are still here.

It is the shock of consciousness

inside skin that bruises,

inside a heart that keeps loving

despite the evidence.

I did not come into this life whole.

I came fragmented by hands, by words, by absence.

I learned early how to leave myself

and called it strength.

I learned how to smile through harm

and called it survival.

Being human is the slow unlearning

of what kept you alive.

My body knew before I did.

It tightened, braced, waited.

It stored unfinished screams

in the jaw, the throat, the hips.

It held memory without language

and begged me to stop explaining

and start listening.

There were days I wanted silence

to take me completely—

not death,

just rest so deep

nothing could reach me.

Being human is discovering

you cannot numb selectively.

When you dull the pain,

you dull the joy,

the wonder,

the yes.

So I learned to feel again

like learning to walk on a broken ankle—

slow, furious, trembling.

Each sensation a risk.

Each breath a choice.

I have met my shadows

not as enemies

but as children

who stayed awake to protect me.

I have thanked them

and asked them to rest.

This is what no one tells you:

healing feels like grief

because it is the loss

of who you had to be

to survive.

Being human is forgiving yourself

for the ways you disappeared

when disappearing was the only option.

It is letting the body finish

what the past interrupted.

I am not chasing light.

I am making room for truth.

I am not becoming “better.”

I am becoming inhabited.

And some days—

that looks like reverence.

Other days—

it looks like lying on the floor

with my hand on my chest

proving to myself

that I am breathing.

If there is a vow here,

it is this:

I will not abandon myself again.

Not for love.

Not for peace.

Not for belonging.

This is being human—

staying

when leaving would be easier.

— Flower InBloom 🌑

You can stop here if this is enough.

Being Human (Raw)

I am here.

That is the beginning and the burden.

Being human is waking up inside consequences you did not choose

and still being asked to choose again.

It is having a body that remembers

what you spent years trying not to know.

It is learning that forgetting was never the same as healing—

it was just postponement.

I learned how to leave myself early.

Not all at once.

In inches.

In moments where staying would have cost too much.

I became functional.

Palatable.

Quiet when I needed to be loud.

Capable when I needed to collapse.

This is what survival looks like from the inside:

absence with a pulse.

My body held the truth without my permission.

It flinched.

It braced.

It kept score when I refused to.

It waited for me to come back.

There were days I did not want to die—

I just wanted to stop being reachable.

To rest without being required.

To exist without explanation.

Being human is realizing

you cannot outrun yourself forever.

Eventually the body closes the distance.

Healing is not light.

It is not relief.

It is the courage to stay present

while everything in you wants to leave.

I am grieving the versions of myself

that were built for harm

and mistook endurance for worth.

I am learning how to feel

without turning sensation into a threat.

How to let the breath finish.

How to stay when nothing is resolved.

There is no redemption arc here.

No arrival.

Just honesty practiced daily.

Some days being human looks like clarity.

Other days it looks like the floor.

Both count.

I am not healed.

I am not broken.

I am no longer gone.

This is enough.

— Flower InBloom 🌑🌿

There is no correct depth. Only the one you can inhabit.