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When I was little, I thought growing up meant standing tall—like a tower of sunlight untouched by the wind. I thought it meant making choices with unshaking hands, or maybe walking through fire without letting the smoke reach my lungs. But as I grow older, I see it differently. Freedom is not always about flying high in the sky —sometimes, it is the gravity that keeps you falling while smiling midair. No one told me that even the sun burns itself to keep shining; that sometimes, freedom is just another word for quiet suffocation. Because when you learn to stand on your own, the world will stop offering a hand. It only watches —waiting for you to prove that you can bear the storm you once dreamed of conquering. They call it resilience, but sometimes it feels like captivity. People see me as a pillar — unmoving, indestructible and eternal. They come to lean on me when their skies crack open, and I let them. But they forget that pillars crumble too. They expect you to carry every weight as if it were light, to keep burning bright like the sun, never mind if your fire consumes what's left of you. They expect my hand to hold, my heart to heal, and my eyes to see light even in the dark —as if I were built to never fall apart. It's draining — to breathe through the weight of a world that only sees you when you're useful. My body feels like a battlefield where every muscle has learned the choreography of pretending. I walk like a prayer that's lost its god, still whispered but never heard. I laugh to cover the sound of my own breaking. I move through the days like a glass —clear and fragile, reflecting everyone's light but my own. And when I falter — when I finally stumble beneath the weight of all their expectations — they look at me with disappointment. "What happened to you?" they ask, as if strength was a lifetime oath, not a borrowed flame. They forget that even the sun sets, and that even the ocean grows weary of carrying the horizon. There are days when my body feels like rust —slow, aching, and corroded by the pressure to always shine. In some way, I am a candle burning from both ends, a bird flying with torn wings because the world applauds the flight but never sees the bleeding. I keep on showing up, not because I can , but because no one taught me how to stop. And when I finally disappear —when I retreat into the quiet, and when I let the world spin without me — they call me distant and ungrateful. But maybe I wasn't meant to be their constant; maybe I was just the lighthouse, guiding others home while drowning quietly in my own waves. I'm tired of being everyone's safe place while my own walls are crumbling. I'm tired of the sunlight in rooms that never offer warmth back. Strength was never supposed to feel like this —like dragging your own body through fire and calling it devotion, like smiling through your own unraveling, like surviving on empty and being applauded for it. Maybe it's time to unlearn the myth that says strength means silence —because even the strongest hands deserve to tremble, even those who have carried the world deserve, at least once, to set it down and simply breathe.