Layered Lyrics 

 

Not long ago, a friend asked me a question that stopped me in my tracks. He knows how music runs through me like a second language, how I breathe through lyrics when I can’t find my own words.

He said, “From the struggles of your childhood to the woman you are now, what would the lyrics to your life sound like? Would they be happy or sad, light or dark?”

It caught me off guard. Not because I didn’t have an answer, but because of how the question was framed. As if a life must fall neatly into one category or the other. As if surviving trauma makes you either broken or fully healed. As if depression is something you either conquer or surrender to.

But anyone who’s lived in that space, the space where trauma shapes the architecture of your soul, knows that isn’t the truth.

We are the in-between.

We carry both the storm and the sunlight. We laugh while grieving. We hope while remembering. We walk through life with a heart heavy from what we’ve endured, and still, somehow, it beats with love.

So I answered him. The lyrics to my life? They wouldn’t be easily defined. Not a polished pop anthem or a slow, sad ballad. My lyrics would bleed, crack, roar, and whisper. They wouldn’t follow a formula. They’d follow me.

My childhood was the kind that gets buried behind closed doors or turned into memoirs people are too afraid to finish. The kind that reminds you some children don’t get childhoods at all. 

I remember reading A Child Called It and feeling like someone had ripped open my chest and exposed a truth I’d spent years trying to hide. The pain in those pages mirrored my own, and yet, there was something different in me too. A voice. Small. Quiet. Persistent. A whisper that said I was meant for more. That I mattered.

Even when the world tried to silence it. Even when I almost believed it didn’t exist. That voice never roared. It barely hummed. But it stayed.

When I was a child in state custody, I didn’t just feel abandoned. I was abandoned. I was no one’s. The kind of emptiness that swallows a soul whole lived inside me. And over the years, that absence of belonging became a wound others used against me.

I was told I would end up alone. That I was too broken to be loved. That my abandonment issues would ruin everything good in my life. And some days, they were right. But not always.

Because alongside the darkness, I carry something else. A light so stubborn it refused to go out, even when I begged it to. I used to believe I had to choose between the two. Now I know better. We are made of both.

The darkness taught me how to survive. The light taught me how to love. And together, they made me whole.

I’ve been through things people don’t come back from. But here I am. Not because I won the war. Because I keep showing up for the battle.

I no longer hate the parts of me shaped by pain. I’ve learned to honor them. They gave me the fire in my voice. The purpose in my art. The strength in my softness. 

Because while not everyone will read the stories like A Child Called It, maybe they’ll hear mine. Maybe they’ll hear the voice of a woman who refuses to let the dark define her. A woman still learning. Still standing. Still rising.

Some wounds don’t fade. Some memories stay sharp. And that’s okay. I’ve found what keeps me grounded. Tools. Truths. People. Art. I no longer run from the dark. I walk beside it. But I don’t let it lead. I lead.

And I use every piece of my past to light a path for others still searching for a way out of their own.

The lyrics to my life? They’re not sad or happy. They’re not fixed to one emotion or ending. They are fluid, raw, unfinished. They are truth. And truth is never just one thing.

So maybe the real answer is this: there are no lyrics yet.

Because I’m still writing them.

One breath.

One scar.

One rising note at a time.