This poem is about that moment when you finally take off the masks other people have placed on you. And you stop asking for permission to just live.
As women, we often get stuck in these roles, right? Daughter, mother, sister, lover. And it can feel like we’re suffocating under all of it. You lose yourself.
So in this poem, I wanted to examine that feeling of taking the mask off. When she looks into the mirror and strips away those labels, there’s something real there. Something that was always there. She’s not becoming someone new. She’s just coming back to who she was before society told her who she was.
It’s not angry. It’s quieter than that. Just clear and calm.
The mask, the mirror, the breath—they’re about taking back your voice. Your power. And I think the bravest act is just remembering who you were all along and choosing to live that truth.
Returning
one morning she unfastened the mask they had pinned to her face— and for the first time she didn’t ask permission to breathe. she stood in the mirror not as a shadow or a daughter, not as a mother or a lover, not as a sacrifice— only herself: raw, undeniable, bright with her own fire. not becoming someone new, but returning to the rhythm of her own heart.
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Beautiful and tender. Women, indeed take many demanding roles throughout their lives, motherhood being the most transformational one perhaps.
"not becoming someone new,
but returning
to the rhythm
of her own heart."
Taking the mask off often feels like becoming. Like recovering from something unnamed. Like finding your way back to the part of yourself that had survived only as a haunted memory.