There are two truths that live inside me

One is ancient and heavy. It remembers everything. It clings to moments I should’ve let go of, holds onto people long after they’ve gone, and carries pain like it’s a sacred duty, as if letting go would dishonour what I lost.

This part of me walks slow. It honours loyalty like a vow, stands guard over my heart like a tired warrior, and loves so deeply, it forgets how to breathe without someone else.

The other part of me is wild. Restless. Fluid. Uncatchable. She dreams in colour too bold for the world, leaps where logic hesitates, laughs where silence lingers, and escapes into imagination when reality gets too loud.

She runs, because she remembers what it felt like to be shackled by fear, duty, trauma. She runs even when there’s nowhere to go, just to feel the wind remind her she’s alive.
But these truths didn’t form out of nowhere. They were forged, by grief, by survival, by consistent heartbreak, by trauma, by learning how to protect myself in a world that never promised protection.

I hold on too long because I’ve lost too much. Because when people vanish without warning, you start gripping everything tighter, as if love can’t leave if you never let it go.

And I chase freedom because for too long, I wasn’t allowed to run. So now I run at every chance I get, even if I don’t know where I’m going. I do both: I hold and I flee. Because no one taught me that love, joy and happiness could last, that safety could be real, that I could be still and still be safe.

So I became both the anchor and the escape plan. Both the healer and the one still bleeding all over the floor. And that’s my flaw. Not that I’m too loyal, or too scattered, but that I carry the weight of my past in one hand, and the burning ache of who I could be in the other, never quite knowing how to stand still long enough to be fully here.
Fully safe.
Fully me.

But I’m learning. Learning that I don’t have to choose. That I can honour the girl who survived and still become the woman who gets to live freely and walk to the beat of her own drum. That maybe my flaw isn’t a flaw at all, but a scar. A sacred reminder that I have felt the depths of life, and still rose with enough power to turn every wound into something real.

And I always will.

Nina Wright, Kokatha and Narungga, Artist, Writer, Healer