Name Me Thunder

Dedication

For the ones who look in mirrors and flinch, but stay. For the hands that bind, the voices that stutter, the bodies that linger too long in shadows. For the souls who loved themselves in fragments, and called that act holy. You are not broken. You are the storm the silence tried to outlive.

Name Me Thunder

I was not born in light. I arrived mid-collapse. A whisper stitched from dust and dread. A pulse, not a promise. And still, I lived.

They dressed me in names that cracked at the corners. Called it faith. Called it form. But it felt like exile. I learned early that silence was easier to survive than explanation. Becoming yourself feels like grief, a funeral without a body, a mourning of myths, a slow severing of the expected. You bury the mask they call you, and rise in the ruin they left behind. You rise not triumphant, but trembling. You rise with the taste of soil on your tongue, your rebirth is not radiant, it is raw. And that is holy.

No one warns you about the mirror. Not the betrayal of glass, not the way it freezes your face mid-question. It reflects, but it does not forgive. Some days, the reflection is neutral, a truce between flesh and thought. Other days, it hisses. It whispers misnames. It counts your bones like they are crimes. This body was not built for joy. But I have learned to inhabit it. To haunt it like a cathedral left to rot. To claim space inside a silhouette that was never supposed to be mine.

And still, I endure.

There are nights when I touch my own shoulder and feel like a guest. When the gravity of my shape becomes unbearable. When my skin aches from trying to contain a soul carved by contradiction. Yet I stay. Yet I speak. Yet I breathe.

They call it confidence when we move without shrinking. But confidence is forged in shadow. It is a hunger, not a halo. It is defiance whispered through clenched teeth.

I rise with wrists that remember the weight of binding. I walk on legs that tremble from history. I drape myself in cloth and call it armor. I do not always love this skin, but I know it has carried me through nights that tried to end me.

And what is love, if not a choice made in the dark? To offer grace to a body bruised by misunderstanding. To wrap your arms around the shame, and not flinch. To name yourself worthy, again and again, even when no one else does.

This is not triumph. This is ritual. This is a sacrament of staying. We are not saints. We are stitched and scorched. We are the poetry that survived being misread. The voice inside, it does not shout. It seduces. It twists your reflection like a blade. It tells you to vanish politely. But we have teeth. We have thunder.

And still, we remain.

Our hearts beat like warnings. Like prayers cut from stone. We walk into rooms already judged, and we sit down anyway. We ask to be called by names we chose ourselves, and bear the silence that follows. This is not ease. This is resistance.

I have walked alleys thick with stares. Entered rooms where my name evaporated mid-syllable. Signed forms that demanded I lie again.

I have loved without being recognized. I have been touched and not seen. I have screamed into pillows and stitched the seams shut again. But I have also pressed my hand to the glass and not recoiled. I have spoken to the face in the mirror as though it were sacred. I have whispered, You are not a mistake. You are a survivor. I have felt desire that did not shame me. I have held hands without explaining. I have laughed so hard I cried, and cried so long I remembered joy.

They love a spectacle. But we are not carnivals. We are catacombs with candlelight. We are the pause between thunder and lightning. The breath held before the hymn. The blood that remembers.

They want us digestible. But we are raw. We are the echo they tried to bury. They want our grief, not our glory. But we are more than eulogy. We are epiphany. Our footsteps are hymns. Our silhouettes, sermons. We walk the earth as reminders of what cannot be erased.

This body, it holds the ache of centuries. It remembers bindings, bathroom stalls, hushed prayers in pharmacies.

It has been misnamed, misgendered, misplaced.

And yet, it has danced. It has laughed with a mouth too often silenced. It has kissed, it has ached, it has wanted. It has dared to hope. It has learned the difference between being seen and being known. It has stood in doorways and not stepped back. It has lived, even when it wasn’t safe.

You do not have to adore every inch of yourself to offer love. You do not have to be whole to be worthy. You do not have to be understood to be valid.

There will be nights when your own skin feels like a stranger. There will be mornings when you do not recognize your reflection.

And still, wake up. Take up space. Say your name like it is thunder.

Even if no one claps. Even if no one echoes. Let the sound of your voice be enough.

Love yourself in fragments. Love yourself in the aftermath. Love yourself in the mirror, even when it lies.

When the voice inside begs for silence, speak louder.

When the world points and stares, walk taller.

When they demand you shrink, burn brighter.

Write your name in the frost. Etch it into bone.

Let the world mispronounce you, but never let it unmake you.

Let your softness be defiance. Let your hunger be holy. Let your reflection be proof.

You are not a lesson. You are not a wound to study. You are not a ghost made palatable by grief.

You are thunder: brutal, aching, relentless.

You are the breath that shatters the hush.

You are the story they were too afraid to write.

Let them look. Let them flinch. Let them fear the roar you make just by surviving.

Signed in shadow. Left as thunder. — S.L. James