to change you must be born again

with each love i cut lose, i was never the same

You peel your skin off, layer by layer, as if it was never meant to fit you in the first place. There is no blood, only the sound of something ripping apart, like old fabric stretched too thin. You tell yourself it doesn’t hurt, but the ache lingers, a ghost trapped beneath your ribs. It is the price of starting over, this slow, deliberate unraveling.

People say self-destruction is the death knell, the end of something. They don’t understand how necessary it is, how the collapse is not just an ending but a beginning. There is a kind of grace in falling apart, a certain beauty in undoing yourself piece by piece. Not a violent unmaking, but a quiet, deliberate dissolution—one that feels almost necessary. You sit in the stillness of your own decay, watching the fragments of your old self drift away like ash in the wind, wondering if this is what rebirth is supposed to feel like.

You can’t be reborn until you’ve burned every part of yourself down to ash, until there’s nothing left of the person you used to be. There is freedom in the wreckage, a kind of brutal clarity in the ruin.

The world is full of stories about rebirth—about phoenixes rising from their ashes, about caterpillars becoming butterflies—but they never tell you about the space in between. The moment when you are nothing but a heap of discarded pieces, waiting for something new to take shape. It is a moment of profound vulnerability, of standing naked before yourself and seeing all the fractures, the imperfections, the parts that never quite fit together.

Maybe this is the truest form of creation, you think. To destroy what once was and make room for something new. Not because the old version of you was wrong, but because it has simply reached its end. There is no need to mourn the self that is being left behind. It has served its purpose. Now, it is time to become something else.

There is something both terrifying and freeing about this process. The idea that you can be born again, not as a whole new person, but as a different version of the same soul. That you can choose which pieces to keep and which to discard, that you can rebuild yourself out of the rubble of your past. But it is not a clean process. It is messy, chaotic, filled with moments of doubt and uncertainty. You are not a phoenix, burning and rising in a single, glorious moment. You are a human, caught in the slow, painful process of becoming.

You strip yourself down to bones and sinew, casting aside the parts that were never yours to begin with. The expectations, the roles, the stories other people have written for you—none of it belongs to you anymore. You want to see what remains when you let it all go, when you strip the meat from the bones and stand there, naked and raw.

Maybe this is why snakes shed their skin—so they can feel the earth beneath their new, tender bodies. Maybe they are not afraid of their fragility, the way you have always been. Maybe they know that in order to grow, they must first become soft, vulnerable. You envy them for that. You have always feared what lies beneath your shell, always believed that the soft parts of you were dangerous.

But now, you are beginning to think that the softness is where the strength lies. You can only be remade if you are willing to let yourself be broken. And so you let the pieces fall away, one by one, until you are nothing but a skeleton of your former self, standing in the ruins of who you used to be. You tell yourself that this is not the end, that the crumbling is just the beginning of something greater.

And as you stand in the rubble of your own making, you feel it—the spark. The tiny flicker of life in the ashes. You inhale, and the air tastes like possibility. The body, stripped of its layers, begins to rebuild itself. The bones are laid bare, but beneath them, something stirs. Something that is not yet you, but will be.

You are not afraid of the fire. You are not afraid of what comes next. Destruction is only the first step, after all. You smile, not the careful, practiced smile you’ve worn all your life, but something new. A smile that has never known fear.

You wait, knowing that rebirth is a patient thing, a slow unfolding. It takes time to rise from the ashes. But you will rise. You have always risen.