I STILL BELIEVE IN COLORS

There is a child in me who still looks at the sky and sees the world in colors.

Life has given her reasons to harden, to stop believing, to keep her heart hidden. Yet somehow, after being disappointed and beaten down, her imagination refuses to be conditioned by what the world has shown her.

Maybe believing in colors isn't naïveté.

Maybe it is defiance.

The world has shown me darkness, and I still look up for beauty.

Recorded where the reflection finds me.

— Heela’s Voice

SILENT CRIES

Some experiences teach us silence before we ever learn how to name what happened.

Silent Cries is a spoken word piece about childhood sexual abuse, betrayal, shame, survival, the loss of safety and voice, and what it can mean to begin reclaiming yourself from experiences that once made silence feel necessary.

This isn't a piece I recreated from where I stand today.

I recorded Silent Cries last year, when these words first needed somewhere to go, and for this episode I chose to keep that original recording the voice, emotion, pauses, and imperfections of the moment in which it was spoken.

A note about the recording:
This reflection found me in bed, just after waking up. No microphone. No AirPods. No studio setup. Just my phone, my raw voice, and the words as they came.

You may hear my breathing, a little movement, or traces of the room around me. I chose not to polish all of that away. There is something about hearing the piece as it originally existed that matters to me.

Sometimes the voice that tells the story later isn't quite the same voice that first found the courage to speak it.

This is that voice.

Recorded where the reflection finds me.

Reflect. Heal. Become.

— Heela’s Voice

Living in Silence

More emotional layers.

More of the internal struggle

the parts of me that learned to shrink, stay quiet, and disappear inside myself.

A raw reflection on letting go, finding my way back to myself, and confronting what it means to take up space again with vulnerability, honesty, and no need to make the journey look pretty.

— Heela’s Voice