Indestructible

This poem takes inventory of some of the losses, fears, traumas, and upheavals I experienced across several extraordinarily difficult years from the end of 2023 through 2026.

It is not a celebration of suffering, nor a claim that surviving it left me untouched.

Quite the opposite.

Many things broke.

But after being forced to confront so many of the experiences I had once feared I could not survive, I discovered something beneath them that remained.

In the poem I call that my center.

I almost hesitate to call myself indestructible.

The word can sound like invulnerability.

That is not what I mean.

I have been hurt.

I have broken down.

I have experienced periods when I genuinely did not know how much more I could take before fracturing completely.

And many things I once depended upon for stability did, in fact, break.

This poem was written after several years in which an extraordinary number of my deepest fears became real.

So I started naming them, one after another:

• Loss.
• Rejection.
• Depression.
• Physical deterioration.
• Relational instability.
• Burnout.
• Financial insecurity.
• Injury.
• Identity upheaval.
• Family violence.
• Spiritual fracture.
• Loss of independence.
• Suicide attempts by someone I loved.
• Caretaking.

And more.

The length of the poem matters to me because accumulation matters.

Any one experience can be survivable while the compounded weight of experience after experience becomes something else entirely.

By the time I write:

“Crushed beneath the weight
of grief and trauma
against the unyielding floor
of cold, hard reality”

there is nowhere left for the poem to go by pretending that resilience made any of this easy or valorous.

And I don't want to romanticize what happened.

“I don't have to like it.
In fact, I hate
That it was necessary
To prove so many times
That I am this strong.”

I still feel that way.

I can recognize what I have learned about myself without becoming grateful for everything that taught it to me.

Some experiences brought growth. Some brought understanding. Some simply hurt. And some things should never have happened.

I don't believe suffering becomes good merely because someone survives it.

But survival does leave evidence.

There were things I once feared would destroy me. Then many of them happened. And I remained.

Not unchanged.

Not unharmed.

Not effortlessly resilient.

But here.

That is the distinction behind the final lines:

“But I am here
And I know now
With certainty
That my center
Is indestructible.”

I am not claiming that nothing can hurt me.

Clearly, many things can.

I am not claiming that I will always cope well, remain composed, or immediately know how to continue.

And I am certainly not claiming that because I have survived so much, I should therefore be expected to survive more.

I am naming something I discovered underneath the damage:

There is some center of self that I have watched remain through extraordinary change.

• My beliefs can change.
• My circumstances can collapse.
• Relationships can end.
• Identities can evolve.
• Plans can fail.
• My body can hurt.
• My sense of possibility can disappear for a time.
• I can become exhausted enough that I no longer feel strong at all.

And somehow, beneath all of that, I remain.

Perhaps I cannot define precisely what that center is.

Integrity comes close.

So does consciousness.

So does whatever part of me keeps returning after everything else has fallen away.

But I know it experientially.

I have met it repeatedly at the bottom of things.

That knowledge has changed my relationship with fear.

Not because I now believe terrible things cannot affect me. I know too well that they can. But some of the things I feared most have already happened.

And I am still here.

There is grief in knowing that.

There is anger in knowing it.

But there is also a kind of freedom:

I no longer need to prove how much I can survive.

I have enough evidence.

I would much rather build a life in which strength is expressed through living fully than repeatedly demonstrated through endurance.

But when fear tells me that some future upheaval might erase me completely, I have something now that I did not have before.

Memory.

Evidence.

The knowledge of having met myself beneath the wreckage.

I am destructible in countless ways.

But the deepest thing I know as myself has survived every destruction so far.

That is what I mean by indestructible.