The Year I Burned My Scripts and Wrote My Own

There are years that change you quietly, and then there are years that drag you to the edge of yourself, hand you the match, and whisper: light it.
This was the latter.
The year I burned my scripts and wrote my own was not a gentle unfolding—it was an incantation, a reckoning, a revolt. I stood at the threshold, spine straight, heart cracked open, watching the pages of my old life curl into flame.

It wasn’t just about casting off what had been written for me. It was about conjuring something of me—raw, sacred, mine. Every line I struck through was a liberation. Every new word, a resurrection.

Living By Someone Else's Rules

For far too long, I inhabited a life dictated by other people's comfort, sculpted to meet their vision of "appropriate," "pleasing," "enough." I learned to smile on cue, to shrink elegantly. They called it being "easy to work with." I called it dying by degrees.

How I Became a People-Pleaser

It’s insidious, the way it begins. A soft nod here, a small silence there. You trade a dream for approval, and then another, until you can’t remember what your own voice sounds like without the echo of someone else’s desire. I became a shape-shifter, fluent in adaptation. But underneath the performance, my true self went hungry.

Validation is a seductive jailer. I danced for scraps of it until I realized: I was exhausted from trying to be beloved by people I didn’t even like.

The moment I saw the mask slipping, I let it fall. The ash of that former self became fertile ground.

The Ritual of Reinvention: Burning What No Longer Serves

There is something almost holy about fire. It destroys, yes—but it clarifies too. The night I set flame to the scripts that no longer served me, I wasn’t just severing ties with a version of myself—I was sanctifying the future.

Each page that curled and blackened was a belief I no longer needed: That I must always be nice. That ambition makes a woman unlovable. That survival means silence.

The fire didn’t just erase. It revealed.
It roared: You are not here to play a part. You are here to write the play.

Writing My Own Story: Lessons From the Fire

Ash is the language of endings, but also of beginnings. From it, I drew lines across new pages. Not neat ones. Not always brave. But honest, at last.

The fire taught me this: Reinvention is not a one-time spell. It’s a constant choice to return to yourself, over and over again, especially when the world demands otherwise.

I do not miss the woman who once contorted herself for applause. I mourn her, perhaps. But I do not miss her.
She burned so I could bloom.