Unpolished, Still Becoming

I am the sum of what I’ve carried— skills gathered like bright stones from places I didn’t know were teaching me.

Every trial, every triumph, a lesson pressed into my palms, sometimes sharp, sometimes shining.

I did not choose all of them, but I kept what I could, and what I kept became me.

Along the way, I learned to follow the quiet pulse of my own ideas— the strange, wandering ones, the ones that others might overlook because they don’t fit neatly into the tidy boxes of the world.

But I gathered them anyway, these small wild thoughts, and let them grow in the open fields of my imagination.

My path has never been flawless. There were days my hands trembled, days I patched myself together with nothing but hope and stubbornness.

Yet even in the mess, I found meaning: the courage to reinvent, the strength to keep going, trusting that creation can bloom in imperfect soil.

Now I stand with all I've collected— skills shaped by experience, insight carved from persistence, a mind that bends toward possibility in ways no one else’s can.

I am not refined, not meant to be; I am a gathering in motion, a mosaic of lessons and missteps forming a pattern only I could make.

And if some call it unpolished or unbecoming, let them.

There is beauty in the uneven edges, truth in the unvarnished grain.

For I am exactly who I was meant to be— unique, creative, unmistakably and unapologetically myself.