“I Wasn’t Meant For Drowning…”

Dear Sash Seabourne,

Today, I stitched a page that carries both the weight of my past and the quiet, steady breath of healing.

It is not a black page, though it could have been.

Because this moment, this part of my story is no longer only about what was endured, but about what has lived through it.

At the center, I placed a small photograph of myself as a child.

A girl who “took every black and bruise in silence – till it coloured half my life.”

A girl who didn’t yet have words for what she was

holding.

A girl who learned to be quiet long before she learned she could be free.

And yet, even then, something in her was reaching.

Your words found me in a time when I was learning how to gently return to her.

When I was beginning to understand that survival was not the end of the story.

“I wasn’t meant for drowning.”

Those words did not feel like a lyric the first time I heard them.

They felt like a truth my soul had been waiting to hear spoken out loud.

So I stitched them today as I was in my studio creating.

Thread through fabric.

Truth through memory.

Breath through silence.

And to complete this piece, I sewed small, imperfect music notes because your song has become breath for me.

A rhythm that reminds me I am still here.

Still rising.

“I was holding onto daybreak.”

There were so many years where that is all it was a quiet, unseen holding.

A waiting for light I could not yet see, but somehow believed would come.

And now, slowly, gently “I can see the sunrise.”

Not all at once.

Not in some grand, sweeping way.

But in moments.

In stitches.

In the soft return to myself.

“My feet are on the ground.”

This is what healing has become for me.

Not escape.

Not forgetting.

But grounding.

A coming back into my body, my life, my story without the weight of silence defining it anymore.

Your song did not erase what was.

But it gave language to what could be.

And today, that language lives here in fabric, in thread, in the face of a little girl who is no longer alone.

And so to finish, I pray:

Lord,

Hold the little girl I once was, and steady the woman I am becoming.

Let the places that once held silence now breathe with Your light.

Remind me, again and again ~

I was never meant for drowning.

Amen and thank you Sash.