What happens when someone loves you before you know how to love yourself? What if being truly seen feels less like salvation… and more like exposure?

In this episode, I break down the writing process behind one of the most emotionally raw poems I’ve written — a piece about self-hatred, intimacy, vulnerability, and the terrifying realization that someone might actually care about you. We talk about repetition as emotional suffocation, why the poem spirals before it heals, and how the final line changes the meaning of everything that came before it.

This isn’t a conversation about “self-love” in the polished internet sense. It’s about the violence of being understood when you’ve spent your whole life trying to disappear.