Adena M'lynn's Voice

“The Actor” By Adena M’lynn Project Lesson - 37  Format Template: Spoken Word YouTube @adenamlynnharmon  I convinced myself I was an actor. Not a mask—no. Not the thin plastic Halloween kind, but a real actor. One who can change like a chameleon before your very eyes. Watch me— I can bend the corners of my mouth into something that resembles joy. I can let my eyes shimmer just enough to convince you I’m alive… to convince me I’m alive. Oh, but don’t let her show too much vulnerability. No, no— just enough to keep you leaning forward in your seat, just enough to make you question your own willingness to offer me help. Because what if you did? What if you reached out, and found the stage lights burning you too? So I give you a performance— a tragedy rewritten as comedy, a pain disguised as plot twist, a sorrow packaged with perfect timing. Clap! She enters. Cue the applause! But here’s the thing nobody tells you about acting, The most dangerous role is the one where you forget y...

Inspired by life events.  B y Adena M’lynn What’s the difference between healing and controlling the pain? See— one looks like breathing, the other looks like holding your breath until your face turns blue. One says: Let the wound bleed, let the scar form, let the body remember what it survived. The other says: Cover it quick, hide the blood, swallow the hurt with another pill, another prayer, another promise. Pain wrapped in panaceas, wrapped in bandages too tight, wrapped in silence that chokes more than it comforts. Healing whispers, This hurts now, but it will not hurt forever. Control shouts, This must not hurt, not now, not ever. Healing is messy. It stains sheets, ruins dinners, makes you cry in parking lots. Control is polished. It smiles in photographs, pastes on affirmations, clenches fists under tables. And me? I’ve tried both. I’ve drowned the ache in pill bottles, stuffed it down with lies, called the covering  strength when really it was surrender. I’ve also ripp...

Inspired by Ecclesiastes 3 and Seasons of Life 1973–Sunday School St.Stephen UMC, Mesquite, Texas   My first prayer was the one everybody knows, “Now I lay me down to sleep…” I said it so many times I could probably say it backwards in my sleep. The second prayer I learned was about food— “God is great, God is good…” We’d fold our hands at the table and race through the words before the food got cold. Then came the big one, the prayer Jesus taught us Himself. The Lord’s Prayer. That one feels different, like it carries the weight of the whole church inside it. It’s not just words you repeat, it’s a prayer that feels like it keeps on praying long after you’ve finished. But there’s one prayer I can’t forget. Not because someone else gave it to me, but because I wrote it myself. It was in Sunday School, the teacher told us to take a scripture and use it to make our own prayer. Most kids went for short verses. I picked a looong one, Ecclesiastes chapter 3— the one about seasons “To eve...

The front porch. Every Southern house, every Midwest farmhouse, every city stoop has one. But today… it’s more than wood and nails, more than chipped paint and rusted hinges.   The front porch is a woman’s confessional, a safe haven, a sisterhood.   Two friends sit here. Maybe they’re rocking in chairs that groan like old bones, maybe they’re perched on the steps, knees brushing, or maybe it’s that swing that squeaks— a song all its own.   Here, nobody’s keeping score. You don’t need to fix your hair, don’t need to put on church lipstick or hide the gray roots. The porch don’t care. And neither does your sister.   Because sisterhood—real sisterhood— it don’t ask you to be perfect. It just asks you to show up. To sit. To breathe. To pour a glass of sweet tea and tell the truth.   The porch has heard it all: arguments with husbands, dreams too fragile to say indoors, prayers whispered for children gone astray, confessions that sting...