An invitation

 "Do not fear your demons. Stand tall, breathe deep, and let your flame meet their smoke. They are not the end of you; they are a threshold. They arrive holding the truths you hid from yourself, the mirrors you turned face down, the keys you thought you were not strong enough to carry. Hold your ground. Let them show you where you shrink, where you trade your voice for approval, where an old hunger still tells you to stay small. Listen until the noise turns into meaning.

A powerful woman does not outrun her darkness; she outgrows it. She steps into the furnace and remembers she is the fire. She does not swallow poison to prove her goodness. She does not call numbness peace. She names what hurts, blesses what is true, and builds a spine from clear boundaries and unashamed tenderness. She is lightning in slow motion—precise, bright, and impossible to domesticate.

Your demons are lessons with claws. They come to sharpen you. They press your edges so you can tell which ones protect life and which ones cut it. They point to the wound and insist you look, not to punish you, but to return you to the power you left there. Ask your fear what it is guarding. Ask your grief what it refuses to bury. Ask your anger what promise it wants you to make in daylight and keep.

Invite them close under the bright lamp of your honesty. Give each one a name. Feed them boundaries and they will stop feeding on you. When their snarl turns into a story, listen. When the story turns into a lesson, write it on your bones. When the heat rises, do not flinch—temper is made in fire, and you were born of a star. Let shame fall away like old bark. Let doubt crack like ice in spring. Let your yes burn clean and your no ring like iron.

Do not fear your demons. Study them, lead them, graduate from them. Walk forward with a gaze that does not lower and a heart that does not harden. You are not the haunted house—you are the architect who opened every locked room and let the windows breathe. You are not defined by what chased you, but refined by what you chose to face. Rise blazing and whole. Become the teacher your demons came to find."

~ Steve De'lano Garcia