30/04/2026
The theft of āI knowāā¦
There is a very sharp edge where empathy stops being a comfort and starts becoming appropriation. It usually happens in the space of a blink when someone looks at the complexity of my health, my biology, my healing and claim to *know* how hard it is.
But they donāt know. They canāt.
Their "knowing" is a thin, unearned bridge. It is an intellectual comprehension that feels empty and reductive to someone standing in the full force of the fire. When someone claims to know my hardships, especially when they havenāt lived them, they are trying to claim a lived reality that they haven't paid for. They are reaching for a visceral weight theyāve never had to carry themselves, and in doing so, they turn my survival into something palatable for their own mind.
I am not your inspiration p**n. I refuse to be the two-dimensional archetype you use to regulate your own emotions. My existence is not a ālesson" designed to make you appreciate your health and body, nor is my navigation of life-altering experiences a "poignant takeaway" for your teachings and conversations. When you call me "inspiring" for simply breathing through the pain, you strip away my humanity and replace it with a mirror for your own fears.
There is a specific kind of soul-wisdom thatās forged in this fire, itās called blood-bought knowledge. Itās compensation for the struggle and the only thing those of us standing in the fire get to keep after everything else has burnt away.
To you, this looks like a deep insight into the fragility of life. To me, it is the grit under my fingernails as I claw my way through life with a body that has rewritten its own laws.
You cannot possibly understand the depth and repetition of surrender required to be able to sit with the brutality of your reality and then love yourself back into existence.
You cannot possibly know what it feels like in your bones to stand at your own graveside and bury all of your able bodied hopes and dreams.
This blood-bought wisdom is private property. It belongs exclusively to me, the person paying the price and doing the burying. When you, the outsider, try to claim this knowing, itās theft. You see the "wisdom," but you don't see, and have never felt, the intense invisible labor, the second-by-second calculations of energy, or the way the "choice" to show up is actually a high-stakes gamble with my own capacity to function.
We need to kill the myth of the universal experience. Not everything in this life is a "teachable moment" for the collective. Some experiences are untranslatable.
There is a sovereign agency in saying: āThis is not yours to know." It is a reclamation of the truth that my life is not a classroom or a teachable moment for you. If you haven't lived the betrayal of a body that ignores your plans, if you haven't stood in the room with pain that tastes like poison and stayed anyway, then you are a tourist in my experience.
The depth of what I navigate is a geography most will never visit. That makes my perspective sacred. It makes my silence valid. I do not owe anyone a translation of my soul. I am not here to be understood. I am here to inhabit the brutal, honest truth of my own existence, standing on ground that no one else can claim.
My blood-bought wisdom is not yours to know.
And yours is not mine either.
