Born Hated
A Prose Poem by Naomi Ward
They hated me before I could talk, before I had the words for what I was:
hated the certainty in a child’s body
that knew itself before the world was ready.
I did not choose that hatred.
I chose, eventually, to stop apologizing for surviving it.
I flinched before I understood why.
Learned to read a room before a sentence:
which self was safe to show,
which had to hide for later.
I swallowed pieces of myself daily and called it love,
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because I had no other word for what I was doing to survive.
I became fluent in smallness,
expert in disappearing in plane sight:
loving people who could not love me back,
because some part of them had already decided what I was could not be forgiven.
That ache moves in the body, the throat, the years.
It teaches you to brace before you know what you are bracing for.
But I was never the thing they feared.
I was a child
walking in the body and the truth that were mine.
The hatred was never about who I was:
only who they needed me not to be.
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