A Self Reflection
There's something viciously elegant about that truth, the way it strips you naked in front of your own mirror; choices, not gifts, carve the meat of what you are. You can possess brilliance that burns like phosphorus, a heart that bleeds empathy like an open vein, intentions so pure they'd make saints weep into their wine, but if your decisions stink of fear, if they reek of that particular hunger that eats you from the inside out, if they carry the unmistakable stench of cowardice, then that's your essence. Not the phantom of what you could have been. Not the potential that whispers sweet lies against your pillow at three in the morning when the world tastes like ash and regret.
"It is our choices that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities." Christ, how I despise the weight of that truth. Rowling birthed it through a wizard's lips, yet it lodged itself in my viscera like shrapnel, like something I've been carrying since I was too fucking young to understand that ruin has a flavour, bitter and metallic, like pennies soaked in vinegar.
I've accumulated poor choices the way some collect scars or lovers; they've become my signature, my calling card. Press ink to every catastrophic decision and you'd lift a portrait so complete it would make forensic scientists weep with joy; every whorl and ridge a testament to my spectacular failures. I chose condescension when someone's soul was haemorrhaging silence. I chose addiction when my brain screamed for lucidity, chose to pour poison down my throat while clarity begged at the door like an abandoned dog. I chose lovers who stripped me down to my bones, who made me less than I was, smaller, more pitiful; and still I clutched at them like rosary beads, like they were talismans against the vast, howling loneliness that lives in my chest cavity where normal people keep their hearts.
I turned my spine on opportunities that could have saved me. Friendships I torched like evidence. Versions of myself I murdered in their sleep because they threatened to become something better than this wreckage I've cultivated.
I've made disaster my mistress, worn catastrophe like expensive perfume, like something French and unpronounceable. Some of us don't simply fall; we fucking plummet with purpose, with dedication. Not from courage, never from courage, but because we're junkies for that sensation of weightlessness, for that split second of false flight before gravity remembers our name and calls us home to impact.
Yet what if these wretched choices were the crucible? What if every fracture forms the architecture of who I'm meant to be? Perhaps I required every goddamned wrong turn, every spectacular collision with my own stupidity, to forge something that resembles honesty. Redemption isn't some destination you arrive at with your luggage and a smile; it's a bearing, a crooked path you hack through the undergrowth of your own failures, recognising how profoundly you've betrayed yourself yet still, still, attempting to sculpt something beautiful from the wreckage, something that might pass for art if you squint hard enough in the right light.
Abilities are accidents of birth, gifts from a universe that doesn't give a shit what you do with them. Choices are confessions written in blood and bile, testimonies that echo through your bones.
Mine have howled louder than any talent I've ever possessed, screamed themselves hoarse while my abilities sat silent in the corner, watching me burn.