Adena M'lynn's Voice

The mirror was never just glass. It was judgment. Memory. War. For most of her life, she avoided it unless absolutely necessary—just long enough to do her hair, to check for bruises she didn’t remember getting, or to make sure her eyes didn’t betray how tired she really was. But she never looked in the mirror. Not really. Because when she did, she didn’t just see herself. She saw all of them. The girl who flinched. The woman who stole. The inmate. The patient. The liar. The lover. The mother. And for a long time, all she could feel was shame. Her body had been taken, used, ignored. Her reflection bore the weight of other people’s choices—hands that hurt her, eyes that undressed her, voices that named her things she never asked to be. And so she stopped claiming it as her own. It became a costume. A disguise. Something to hide behind or use as a weapon when she needed to survive. Sex was her weapon of choice. And sometimes, her punishment. Maggie, her executioner knew how to dole out pa...

She didn’t know the exact moment her daughter stopped calling her “Mom.” There wasn’t a final word or dramatic exit. Just a slow, widening silence—measured in missed birthdays, unsent letters, and the cold weight of time. Estrangement doesn’t scream. It just stops speaking. Her daughter had been a college freshman the last time they spoke face to face. Old enough to know disappointment, too young to understand trauma. She had witnessed the arrests, the personality altering and swings, the shutdowns. She had watched her mother vanish into locked doors and reappear as someone more fragile, lost, and more broken than before. And when the silence started, it made a terrible kind of sense. Because what could she say? “I’m sorry I missed your school play, I was institutionalized.” “I didn’t forget your birthday—I was in prison.” “I love you, I just didn’t know how to be honest and to staying would cause more harm.” No Hallmark card could hold that much pain. No phone call could fix it. So in...

Hospitals are supposed to be places of healing. But for her, they were another kind of stage—curtains drawn back, lights glaring, audience unseen. A theater where she was always performing, never applauding. Only this ballet had no music, just the low hum of fluorescent lights and the rustle of paper gowns. She lost count of how many acts she’d performed under that cold, relentless glow. Sometimes she entered willingly, hand in hand with someone who cared. Other times, she was carried in—by EMTs, by officers, by the heavy choreography of breakdowns. The opening scene was always the same “the intake” act. Bright lights overhead. A script she never wanted to learn. “What brings you here?” She wanted to say: Everything.  Instead, she muttered her rehearsed lines, depression, anxiety, self-harm. Sometimes silence took the stage. She let the machines take her pulse while someone with a clipboard decided which part of her to erase. The lights in psych wards never dim. They buzz and flick...

Prison, for all its harshness, became a kind of refuge—a sacred ground born from shared suffering. Behind the walls, among the clamor and control, lived a quiet truth: most of the women there were not just inmates, but survivors—survivors of some of the worst atrocities. Nearly 85% carried the scars of violence, much of it rooted in childhood, etched deep into bone and memory. Shame ran through them like blood—unspoken, but ever-present. And yet, in that broken place, something unexpected emerged: sisterhood. A space where tenderness was rare but deeply craved. Where being seen—truly seen—and heard without judgment became its own kind of healing. Prison isn’t just steel and concrete. It’s a suspended world where time slows and pain echoes. Every mistake becomes a splinter driven deeper under the nail. And your name—your past—follows you like a shadow so heavy, few dare to reach for you. But within that shadow, there are women who hold one another up. And somehow, that makes even the da...