A Rage Manifesto (TW : Self harm )

The thing about therapy is—you're not getting over something or going around it. You only ever go through it. This poem was born from that understanding. While it draws from personal emotion, it is mostly fictional—with details altered for privacy. And if those details resemble anyone, it is purely coincidental. Also, I want to reassure anyone reading that  I no longer engage in self-harm and I’m in a better place now.

This isn’t a story with clear heroes or villains. It's a layered portrait—one version of it.
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The first time I pressed a blade to my skin,
I wasn’t weeping
I wasn’t curled in some cinematic despair
I was volcanic—
the kind of fury that eats tectonic plates for breakfast.

I never believed I was designed for smallness,
Though I was built like a paperweight
in a kingdom where glass towers cracked downwards—
and I, stupidly barefoot,
kept slicing myself on their ambitions.

But this is not a lamentation of victimhood.
This is a manifesto.

She—white coat saint,
cradler of newborn lungs—
once shattered a statue on my head.
I remember the blood not as pain
but as paint on clean white walls
It was her panic, not the impact,
That taught me power structures could be bent.

When she shivered at the red on the floor,
I didn’t cry.
I chronicled–
The way her eyes flitted like hunted birds
She knew this one couldn’t be bleached away
This wasn’t bathtub submersion or
hunger games behind locked doors—
This was traceable.

Unprofessional.

That's when I learned:
reputation weighs more than children.

You can’t birth miracles in a hospital
and send your own daughter to the ER.
I named it - The Hippocratic paradox
Or hippo-crisy, for short.

That’s when it bloomed in me.
Not hope.

Power.

Because blood speaks louder than bruises.
And image is everything
to people who wear masks as skin.

Just like him.

He—worshipped  order and discipline,
The one who banned sandals
because they revealed bruised ankles—
always beat beneath the hemline.
because knee scars are modest,
and socks are more loyal than bloodlines.

The man in his all power and glory
He knelt once
to unlace his own guilt,
as I leaked into a bucket behind the tool shed.

I didn’t flinch.
But it was exhilarating to watch him crumble.

And he wept
like the sky after a drought.

Power tastes like rust in the mouth
when the gods who molded you fall face-first in your blood
and whisper “please.”

And I understood.

That’s why she once scaled the well’s lip,
My baby sister strapped to her side like a timebomb,
and told him,
“What will you do when you’re not the one with the hands on the trigger?”

That man—
who once threw crumbled paper at an employee for writing
leave application instead of leave request—
because in his empire, even absence must be begged—
And folded like a well behaved paper

But when I held a fruit knife
and spoke in a voice made of church bells?
He begged.

You want anecdotes?

So,  one night I picked up a razor
Held it gently against my throat like a violin bow.
Said nothing—
because silence was louder.
And suddenly,
the man who once made a politician cry
was at my feet again.
Mouth full of sorries.
Voice like gravel under rain.

Because even death, in our house,
must RSVP in advance
And had to be rehearsed,
like a family event.
No messy ends.
No headlines about failure.

But the rage—
What do I do with this volcanic rage?
this magma bottled in bone?

I finally understand
why my oldest brother dives out of helicopters
Why the second climbs into warzones
like he’s finally home—warm and merciless.
Why the third burns rubber on highways
like he’s chasing ghosts.
Why my sister walks into traffic
like she’s offering herself to probability.

We flirt with destruction,
not for thrill,
but because it’s the closest thing to control

The unknown is not scary anymore
When the known can be controlled to submission The unknown is freedom.

Call us cowards
Because we all wanted an out.
We just did n’t have the courage to vanish forever.
So, we chased the scream in other ways—
falling, spinning, shattering—
hoping something
finally breaks.