This morning, I keep thinking about the storm I carry inside me—how it’s always been there, humming just beneath the surface, daring the world to notice. It is not new. It didn’t just arrive one day. It was born with me, braided into my breath, threaded into every bone.

Some days, I wonder if people can see it—the way it presses against the edges of my skin, aching to break free. Most of them don’t. Most of them see only what they want to see—a woman who smiles, who carries the weight of the world so gracefully they assume it must not be heavy at all.

But I know better. I know all too well what it costs to be unstoppable.

Society taught me young to be small, to be quiet, to fold my fire neatly inside myself. It was called it polite. Society called it the mark of good girl. But what they really wanted was for me to be less. Less difficult. Less brilliant. Less alive.

But the storm became a force I could not contain, and it would not be silenced. It cracked my rib cage open from the inside out. It roared in the spaces where silence was expected. It pulled me back to my feet every time the world knocked me down.

There is a force inside me that refuses to yield. It does not apologize. It does not ask permission. It knows, even when I forget, that I was never meant for smallness, never meant to be quiet, never meant to fit inside the lines someone else drew.

I carry a storm, and the storm carries me. Maybe that’s the secret no one ever taught me—that I was never supposed to tame it. I was supposed to become it. And this morning, sitting here in the brilliant light of morning with the windows rattling, I understand something I have always known but never said out loud:

I am the storm. I am the force. I am the woman who cannot be contained. And I would not change a damn thing.