There will be voices — internal and external — that attempt to write a smaller story for you. The work of the overcomer is to hold the pen.
There will be voices. Some of them will come from outside — people who, for their own reasons, need you to be smaller than you are. Who are unsettled by your growth, your clarity, your refusal to accommodate them at your own expense. They will tell you who you are in language that sounds like concern, or love, or plain fact. It is none of those things. It is an attempt to keep you in a shape they recognise.
And then there are the voices inside. The ones that learned their lines a long time ago, from people and places you have long since left. They sound like you, but they are not you. They are recordings, playing on loop, of things you were told about yourself before you had the authority to disagree.
The work of the overcomer — the daily, unglamorous, lifelong work — is to hold the pen. To refuse to let those voices, internal or external, author the story of who you are. To remember, again and again, that you are the one who gets to say.
This is not a one-time decision. It is a practice. You will forget, and then remember, and then forget again. You will catch yourself shrinking to fit a room you have outgrown, and you will have to choose, in that moment, to stand back up. You will hear the old recording and have to answer it, aloud or in the silence of your own mind: that is not who I am. Not anymore.
The fragrance I created exists for this. Not as a solution, but as a cue. A scent you wear on your skin that, over time, your body learns to associate with the remembering. With the moment you stop, pause, and recall — before the day takes hold — that you are an overcomer. That the story is yours. That the pen has always been in your hand.
You are who you say you are. Not who they said. Not who the recording says. Who you — the woman reading this, the one who has come through so much already — choose to become. Hold the pen. Write it well.
Stop. Pause. Spray. Overcome.
