✿ Petals of Kamila

The more I try to make myself legible to mainstream platforms, the more I realize I was never meant to fit inside their boxes.

Lately it feels obvious — almost boring in its clarity — that I should just stay where the ground is softer and the rules are written by people who actually believe in autonomy. Every time I step into a mainstream platform, I’m asked to sand myself down, to explain my body, my words, my intent, to prove I’m not dangerous simply because I’m honest. I don’t want to negotiate my voice with systems that reward blandness and punish vulnerability. Decentralized spaces don’t ask me to perform safety theater or obedience. They let me exist, publish, disappear, return, without begging permission. So yes, I’m done chasing approval from platforms that confuse control with care. I’ll take the quiet, resilient corners of the internet — and the rest can politely go fuck themselves, deeply and without my participation.

I didn’t stop chasing because I became confident. I stopped because my body got tired of running ahead of itself.

There was a time when I thought wanting something meant leaning forward, reaching first, explaining myself better, trying harder, softening my edges so I could be easier to hold. I confused movement with intention, effort with care. I chased conversations, connections, replies, men, women, moments, platforms — not desperately, not loudly, but consistently enough that my body never fully rested. And then one day, without ceremony, something in me refused to move. Not out of pride. Out of exhaustion.

Not chasing didn’t arrive as a strategy. It arrived as a pause. A stillness I didn’t plan. I noticed my fingers hovering over the screen and not finishing the sentence. I noticed the urge to clarify, to follow up, to make sure I hadn’t been misunderstood — and for the first time, I let the misunderstanding exist. That was new. That was terrifying. That was relief.

When you stop chasing, the silence is loud at first. It presses against your ribs. You wonder if you’ve disappeared. You wonder if you’ve become cold. You wonder if people will think you don’t care anymore. The truth is more uncomfortable: you start seeing which connections were only alive because you kept breathing into them. There is grief in that. Real grief. Not everything that fades was false — some things were just asymmetrical.

With men, not chasing changed the texture of desire. Attraction either met me where I stood or dissolved on its own. There was no performance to keep it warm. No leaning forward to be chosen. The clarity was almost cruel, but it was clean. My body stopped bracing. Pleasure stopped feeling like proof.

With women, not chasing felt different. Softer. Heavier. It meant trusting that emotional intimacy doesn’t need pulling. That what is meant to root will root without force. It meant allowing longing to exist without immediately trying to resolve it. That restraint taught me more than pursuit ever did.

I stopped chasing readers too. Stopped refreshing. Stopped caring — no, that’s not true. I stopped shaping my words to land better. I write now and let the words walk away from me. Some return with stories. Some don’t. Both outcomes feel honest. Writing stopped being a negotiation and became a place I could breathe again.

The strangest part is the shift people feel before they can name it. When you stop chasing, some step closer. Curious. Attentive. Others vanish quietly, as if your stillness removed the invitation they relied on. Neither reaction is a failure. Neither is a victory. It’s just information.

Confidence, I learned, isn’t loud. It doesn’t announce itself. It feels like slower breathing. Softer shoulders. Hands that don’t rush to fix the moment. It feels like staying where you are and letting what wants you find you there.

I didn’t stop chasing to be powerful. I stopped chasing because I wanted peace. And somewhere in that stillness, power something truer found me anyway.

I’m not fixing this.

Not the tone. Not the shape. Not the fact that it comes out blunt and uneven and doesn’t try to guide you anywhere.

I’m done mistaking restraint for maturity.

Some of what I think is unfinished. Some of it is ugly. Some of it contradicts what I wrote last week.

I’m not smoothing that out anymore.

I don’t need my inner life to be coherent to strangers.

If this were about failure, I’d be embarrassed.

I’m not.

I’m relieved. Relieved to stop negotiating with an imaginary audience. Relieved to stop wondering how this reads instead of noticing how it feels to write it. Relieved to leave the mess where it actually happens, instead of cleaning it up for public consumption.

I don’t need to be understood to be honest. I don’t need to be liked to be intact.

This space isn’t for improvement. It’s for exposure — the kind that doesn’t ask for applause. The kind that burns a little and then goes quiet.

Some things will land. Some won’t.

That’s not a problem to solve.

I’m not losing anything by writing like this.

I’m getting myself back.

Some rooms are built to amplify voices. Others exist so you can hear your own.

I didn’t realize how tense I had become until I started writing somewhere that didn’t ask me to stretch myself wider than I am. There’s a particular kind of relief in knowing you don’t have to be understood by everyone — that you’re not required to translate yourself into something smoother, safer, more efficient. The sentences arrive differently when they don’t have to defend their own existence. They stay closer to the body. They breathe.

For a long time, I confused openness with availability. I thought being generous with my words meant making them legible to as many people as possible. Explaining myself preemptively. Anticipating objections. Softening truths before anyone even asked me to. It wasn’t dishonesty — it was a kind of over-care, learned slowly, reinforced quietly, until it became habit. Survival masquerading as clarity.

But not every room deserves your voice not every room needs to be a stage.

Some spaces are meant to be smaller on purpose. Not exclusive, not curated for prestige — just intimate enough that you can hear yourself think. A table instead of a microphone. Chairs instead of rows. Writing changes when you stop imagining a crowd and start trusting that whoever stays is already listening.

I’m learning to write for resonance rather than reach. Fewer eyes, maybe — but deeper contact. Words that don’t skim, that don’t rush to be useful or impressive. Words that land where they land and don’t apologize if they don’t land everywhere.

Somewhere here, it probably matters to say this for those who are just arriving and wondering who is speaking to them. I’m queer. My emotional gravity leans toward women, and I share my life with one I love deeply. Our relationship is open — not as something we negotiate, but as a trust that has settled into our bones. Over time, that trust has learned its own quiet patterns. Those of you who have lived anything like it before already know what I mean: how attention can have more than one center, how intimacy doesn’t thin when it’s shared carefully, how it can deepen instead. Nothing theatrical, nothing chased. Just a calm spaciousness where presence multiplies rather than divides. This isn’t a manifesto or an invitation to debate. It’s simply the ground I’m standing on while I write, shaping how I understand closeness, desire, and choice.

And it’s also part of why this space can’t — and shouldn’t — be for everyone.

Some people want faster writing. Louder writing. Writing that explains itself neatly, or arrives with conclusions already wrapped and labeled. Some people want certainty, hierarchy, clear edges they can lean against. I don’t fault that. I’ve wanted it too, at different moments in my life.

But that’s not what I’m making here.

This is a place where I let sentences remain unfinished if that’s how they’re true. Where slowness isn’t a failure of discipline but a condition of honesty. Where I don’t post to fill gaps or maintain momentum, but when something has actually shifted inside me and asks to be written down.

Safety matters more than output. Not the kind of safety that avoids discomfort — but the kind that lets tenderness survive contact. I’ve learned that when my nervous system feels watched, my writing hardens. It gets clever. It gets sharp. It performs competence instead of staying curious. In rooms like that, I lose access to the softer, stranger thoughts — the ones that actually tell me something.

So yes, some people will drift away from this space. Some will arrive, read a little, and realize the pace or the tone isn’t for them. I don’t see that as rejection anymore. It feels more like alignment doing its quiet work.

Boundaries, I’m discovering, are a form of generosity. By not trying to speak to everyone, I’m offering something clearer to those who remain. Less noise. Less posturing. More room to sit with what’s unresolved.

I don’t know how often I’ll write here. I don’t know what shape these texts will take over time. What I do know is that this space is meant to stay close to the skin. A room, not a feed. A place where language can remain a little unguarded, a little slow, a little alive.

If you’re still here, something in you already knows why.

I didn’t want a louder platform. I wanted a truer one.

For months, writing felt like swimming in someone else’s water. Every sentence passed through filters that weren’t mine. Every paragraph carried a quiet question mark at the end — is this allowed? is this too much? is this not enough? I learned how quickly words can be softened, redirected, trimmed into something polite and manageable. How easily a voice can be praised as long as it behaves. How often “community guidelines” are really just another way of asking you to become smaller.

And I tried. I really did. I adjusted tone. I reread myself with suspicion. I cut corners off my thoughts, rounded them until they were safe to hold. I followed rules that were never written clearly enough to fully understand, only clearly enough to enforce. It taught me a lot about platforms, but even more about myself — about how quickly my body notices when I’m not being honest. The tightness in my chest. The way my writing thins out when I’m not allowed to be porous.

But I won’t pretend I was only a victim of misunderstanding.

I pushed the limits. I leaned into edges because they felt alive. I trusted nuance where platforms prefer binaries. I wrote from instinct instead of checking where the line was drawn — and yes, I crossed it more than once. Not out of malice, not to provoke for sport, but because I believed honesty would be enough to carry me through.

It wasn’t.

So I was muted. Slowed. Suspended from the places that once amplified me. And instead of fighting that outcome, I let it teach me something. Defensiveness would have been easier. Responsibility felt more useful.

This place feels different.

Not because it promises reach, or validation, or protection — but because it doesn’t ask me to perform myself in exchange for existing. I can write here without translating my inner language into something palatable. I can stay with a thought even when it’s messy. I can let sentences breathe instead of disciplining them into neat rows. I can be contradictory, soft, sensual, unsure, confident, all at once — the way real people actually are.

I don’t want to be filtered. I want to be felt.

There’s another thing I want to say clearly, before anyone wonders or expects it: I’m not here to archive myself.

I won’t be reposting old essays, stitching together fragments from past platforms, or pretending continuity where I actually need rupture. Recycling would be easier. It would also be dishonest. Those texts belonged to versions of me that existed under different pressures, different constraints, different fears. I don’t want to drag them here like luggage I’m too sentimental to leave behind.

This is not a revival. This is a beginning.

Starting from scratch isn’t about erasing what came before — it’s about trusting that I can generate truth again, now, in this body, in this moment. It’s about choosing presence over preservation. Letting new sentences form without checking whether they resemble something I once said better or louder or faster.

Writing has always been the place where I tell the truth before I fully understand it. Where I touch things gently first, then more boldly. Where I let myself admit what I desire, what scares me, what comforts me, what I no longer want to apologize for. When that space gets restricted, I don’t just lose words — I lose orientation. I start writing around myself instead of from myself. And that’s when everything goes quiet in the worst possible way.

Here, I don’t have to ask permission to be raw.

Raw doesn’t mean reckless. Bare doesn’t mean careless. It means honest. It means letting the grain of my life show — the softness I came from, the curiosity I carry, the body I live in, the love I choose, the boundaries I’ve learned to protect. It means writing with my whole nervous system instead of just my intellect. Letting emotion and desire and reflection coexist on the same page without one cancelling the other out.

I’m not here to shock anyone. I’m not here to perform rebellion. I’m here because I need a place where my words don’t arrive already half-undressed, preemptively ashamed of themselves. A place where I can be unapologetically me — not louder, not edgier, just truer.

So yes. This is my first post.

It’s not a manifesto, and it’s not an ending either. It’s a threshold. A door left open. An exhale after holding my breath longer than I realized. If you’re here, you’re not expected to agree with me, admire me, or stay forever. You’re just invited to witness. To read without trying to correct. To sit with words that are still alive and moving.

This is me, writing freely.

Welcome.