There is a version of my name that existed before anyone hurt me.

I sometimes wonder if she is still somewhere inside it.

She was young enough to believe that a future was something that simply happened to you. You studied. You grew older. You became someone's daughter, someone's wife, someone's idea of a respectable woman. You followed the shape of the life placed in front of you and called it destiny.

Then life taught me that a woman can lose herself without ever leaving her own body.

For a while, I mistook being alive for being present.

I was there.

I was studying. Speaking. Smiling. Answering when spoken to.

But somewhere underneath all of that, I had begun to disappear.

What nobody tells you about losing yourself is that there is no funeral.

No one comes to mourn the girl you were becoming.

The world simply continues.

People ask ordinary questions while you are carrying an extraordinary silence.

And you learn to answer them.

I think that is one of the strangest things about women: how often we are expected to remain functional while something inside us is breaking.

But I did not remain broken.

I became inconveniently alive.

I began writing.

At first, words were only somewhere to put the things I could not carry. Then, slowly, they became evidence.

Evidence that I still had a voice.

Evidence that my mind was still mine.

Evidence that what happened to me had not taken everything.

I wrote until the girl I had been afraid to become began appearing on the page.

She wanted things.

A career.

Her own money.

Books.

A life that belonged to her.

A future that did not need anyone's permission.

And I realised something I had never been taught:

A woman does not become free only when she leaves what hurts her.

Sometimes she becomes free when she stops asking whether she is allowed to want more.

I have stopped wanting to be called strong.

Strength is a word people give you when they have no language for what you survived.

I would rather be called alive.

Because alive means I am still changing.

Still learning.

Still capable of wanting.

Still capable of being frightened and moving forward anyway.

Still capable of looking at the life ahead of me and saying:

I want this one.

Not the life that was chosen for me.

Not the life that would make everyone else comfortable.

Mine.

Perhaps that is what selfhood really is.

Not finding yourself.

Not becoming someone extraordinary.

But refusing, finally, to abandon the ordinary girl inside you who always knew she deserved to exist.

I don't think I was saved.

I think I was returned to myself.

And there is a difference.

Being saved makes someone else the author of your survival.

Being returned to yourself means you pick up the pen.

I did.

I am still writing.