The Ordinary World:
The Walled City

Before the winds whispered... before the walls cracked, my life looked like success.

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I had done what I was told:
married young, bore sons,
kept house, built a career, served a god I didn’t yet know,
performed the good girl in a story not my own.

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I lived inside a box —
quiet, loyal, compliant —
a small container painted with patriarchal promises:

be selfless, work hard, smile, obey,
and everything will turn out alright.

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But behind the smile was survival.
Behind the service, suppression.
Behind the big house, a crumbling spirit.

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I was Cinderella without the ball —

left behind with dust, dishes and silence.
sweeping pain under rugs,
biting my tongue until it bled truth,
swallowing grief  — too loud for the tribe I was born to belong to. 

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I wore the mask well.

     To them, I was “blessed.”
     Inside, I was disappearing.

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I stayed in a marriage marked by trauma
because I believed God asked me to.
Because “I made my bed,”
and good girls lie in it.
Because that’s what love looked like in the stories I was handed.

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My boys were the center of my world —
their happiness, their safety,
my only compass.

To pause and breathe in beauty?
To feel alive in my own body?
That was not in my awareness.
I was surviving.
Not living.
Just holding it all together, quietly unraveling inside.

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I was the black sheep in a flock of extroverts,
the quiet one, the introspective one,
always sensing something more,
but keeping that knowing tucked away
beneath performance, politeness, and pain.

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This was my walled city.
This was my “ordinary world.”

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And yet…
a wind had started to blow.