Who I Am

People love to slap labels on you when they don’t understand your fire. They call you angry. They say you’re hard. They whisper, “She’s intense.” But underneath those judgments is always the same quiet thought they never say out loud—She must be damaged.

Let me clear something up. I am not a product of damage. I am a product of survival. And that’s a whole different beast.

I didn’t grow up with safety nets or soft landings. I raised myself in the cracks, in the silences, in the places where love should’ve been—but wasn’t.

I learned how to build armor when most kids were learning how to be held. I learned how to fight long before I ever learned how to rest.

When you grow up like that—when the world hands you survival instead of safety—it doesn’t just shape you. It carves you. It leaves fingerprints on everything — how you trust, how you love, how you move, how you speak.

It shapes the way your words come out like fire instead of feathers. It shapes the way you walk into a room—chin up, spine straight, daring anyone to try and knock you over.

But being shaped by something doesn’t mean it owns you. Yes, my circumstances carved me, but I decided who the fuck I became. I could’ve folded.

I could’ve lived out the same cycle that tried to swallow me whole. I could’ve become small, bitter, broken. But I didn’t.

Instead, I took everything I was handed—the pain, the neglect, the silence, the fire—and built a spine out of it. I learned how to stand on my own name.

I learned how to speak in a language that isn’t soft, but it’s real. And now people look at me, at the way I speak and write and fight, and they wonder how someone can talk like me and still be healed.

My fierceness isn’t proof of being unhealed. It’s proof of how far I’ve come.

When you’ve had to raise yourself, you grow sharp edges. Not because you want to hurt people—but because softness was never promised to you.

My voice isn’t soft because my life wasn’t soft. And I don’t owe anyone an apology for that. I’m not a subject of my circumstances. I’m the result of how I fought through them.

I’m the woman they built without meaning to—the one they didn’t expect to survive, much less rise.

There’s a difference between being shaped and being defined—

Shaped means your story carved itself into you — it left marks you can’t erase.

Defined means it still controls the pen. I took the fucking pen back a long time ago.

My circumstances may have shaped me— but my will— is what defines me.

I speak the way I do because silence almost killed me. I write the way I do because pretending would’ve kept me stuck. I stand the way I do because nobody taught me how to lean.

And I’m spiritual because Spirit met me exactly where I was—not where anyone thought I should be.

I’m not a victim of my story. I’m the author of its ending.

So when people look at me—the way I talk, the way I love, the way I move through this world—and wonder why I am the way that I am, the answer is simple…

I had to become this woman to survive. I chose to stay standing when everything tried to break me.

Being fierce isn’t a flaw. It’s my foundation.

This doesn’t explain who I am.

It claims it.

— Jaye