The Unarmoring

So many years in the making, and it cracks just like that.

The armor you’ve worn your whole life, the one so heavy it coats the very tips of your limbs, suddenly feels thinner than you ever believed.

The same armor that has been hiding that fragile, stubborn, martyr heart of yours.

Martyrdom felt like strength, and you carved its symbol into the armor as if it were holy.

But maybe, just maybe, not everyone who wears armor is a martyr.

Maybe no one truly wants to be one.

Maybe, deep down, we all just want to live as if the cracks don’t matter.

And then comes that moment…

When everything bursts through anyway, like something salt-heavy rising from the deep, a truth stirred loose by pressure and time.

You smell the corrosion before you hear it.

Crack. Crack. Crack.

Suddenly the armor that once protected you is failing, shattering, giving way in all the places you swore were solid.

Because no façade, no matter how polished, is ever bereft of its tiny indentations, those quiet holes in the system that always let the truth seep through.

Drip. Drip. Drip.

The truth you try so hard to hide begins to leak out.

Your light and your shadow, your sun and your moon, the polished version you offer the world, and the raw, unfiltered one you keep buried beneath the surface.

And this where I ask you.

Can you really face it?

The duality of being?

Not just the light, but the shadows that peel back your martyrdom and show you what’s been trembling underneath?

Is this where the martyr breaks, or where she’s finally revealed?

Was the symbol you carved one of strength, or of suppression?

A quiet keeper of the façade, hiding every tremor, hoping the world would never notice how much it cost to stay intact.

Drip. Crack. Drip. Crack.

But here it is now, your truth in fragments, spilling through every fracture, refusing to be contained.

Bare. Unarmored. Honest.

And the thing you feared the most?

That whisper in the metal. The truth that finally cut through: true martyrs never wear armor.