I carried all those moments
the escalator, the jeepney,
the silence, the shaming,
the abandonment, the minimizing,
the erasure of all the small
AND big moments
I carried all of it for years
until my body finally couldn’t anymore.

I collapsed
and instead of seeing what broke me,
instead of tracing the cracks
back to the people and systems
who were supposed to protect me
they labeled me.

Sumpungin.
Mental illness.
Chemical imbalance.
Personality disorder.

As if I was defective.
As if my collapse wasn’t a natural consequence
of sustained, unacknowledged, relational trauma
of being the one who held everything
while getting nothing back.

They pathologized my grief.
They medicalized my exhaustion.
They called my collapse a diagnosis,
instead of a response to a world
that never made room for me
They used it to absolve themselves.
A seal they can stamp on my back
and walk away feeling morally clean.

There’s nothing wrong with receiving support,
with using language when it feels empowering,
when it’s chosen, when it makes sense.
But what happened to me
It wasn’t chosen.
It was imposed.
It was used to shut me up.
To file me away.
To make my pain a personal failure
instead of everything that was done to me.

That’s not care.
That’s not love.
That’s containment.
That’s a system protecting itself
from what you expose when you fall apart.

I was never the disorder.
I was the reflection they couldn’t bear to see.

They pointed at the fire in my nervous system
without ever asking who lit the match
They named the storm in my mind
without ever looking at how long
I was left out in the rain

I didn’t break because of my own doing.
I broke because no one held me when I needed to rest.
I collapsed because they gave me
no other place to put the weight.