Adena M'lynn's Voice

by Adena M’lynn I found her— no, them— at sixty-three. A lifetime later, and the mirror finally cracked wide enough for me to see what had been hiding in plain sight. Dissociative Identity Disorder— they call it a diagnosis, but to me, it’s a roll call of every ghost I ever made to keep myself alive. Each one wore my face, but different eyes— some kind, some terrified, some tired of the fight. And now I stand in the aftermath, counting the wreckage of a life I thought was mine alone. How do you say sorry for the hurt you never meant, for the words another voice spoke through your trembling mouth? How do you own the pain when the hand that caused it was yours— and not yours? I see the faces I love— each one marked with the fingerprints of confusion, with the bruises of my becoming. And I wonder— did they ever know how fractured I was? How every smile I gave was held together with invisible glue and shaking prayers? There is carnage in remembering. In realizing that survival was not clea...

A Spoken Word Poem on Self-Healing and Love Hi, my name is Adena… You’ve been broken, Adena.  You weren’t even aware of it— not at first, not when silence became your second skin, not when laughter sounded borrowed, not when trust felt like a stranger’s accent. Memories are a funny thing. They come like shadows, stretching long across the floor when the sun begins to set. They slip into the room when you’re not looking— a smell, a sound, a touch of air too heavy to name. And— here you are, Adena. Still breathing. Still searching the sky for shapes in the clouds. Still learning to call the cracks in your soul something other than weakness. You see, broken doesn’t mean ruined. Broken means you’ve survived the fall and carried every shard back home. Broken means you’ve rebuilt yourself in the image of courage, one trembling piece at a time. Love— not the kind written in sonnets, but the kind that sarts with your own reflection— is teaching you patience. It says:  Sit with yoursel...

by Adena M’lynn There’s a flood warning in her chest every morning— Grief swelling behind the levees of her ribs, where childhood never learned to swim. She carries a drowning girl in her lungs, gasping between grocery aisles and conversations that start with “How are you?” and expect a lie in return. Her smile is earthquake-proof— reinforced with sarcasm and silence. But beneath her skin, fault lines shift without warning. She’s learned to talk without trembling, even when the past erupts like lava from a fault she didn’t create but still gets blamed for. Her body is a wildfire zone. A red flag warning every time she’s touched without consent. Even kindness feels like a spark— too close, too warm, and suddenly she’s back in the blaze of hands that branded her before she could spell the word “no.” She’s lived through landslides of trust. One betrayal pulls down a mountain of belief. She builds relationships on shaky soil, hoping no one notices how much of her foundation eroded before s...