the every version of me

i don't think people realize how quickly i have changed over the years, mostly because from the outside it probably looked like reinvention. from where i stood, it often felt more like burial.

there was the million-dollar baby Bailey whose ambitious lit up the building. she learned how to negotiate, how to lead, how to make herself impossible to dismiss. she liked beautiful things because she had worked very hard to become someone who could give them to herself.

then came the Bailey who discovered what it felt like to be looked at. she was sexier, louder, magnetic in a way she knew exactly how to use. the spotlight suited her. for a while, she became the golden girl of the industry, the one people remembered after she left the room. confidence became performance, charm became currency, and being desired sometimes felt easier than being understood.

there were uglier chapters too, and i have no interest in editing them out just because i know better now.

there was the alcoholic Bailey, drinking past whatever she did not want to feel. the slutty Bailey, who sometimes confused being wanted with being held. the manipulative one, clever enough to know exactly which strings to pull when she was scared of losing control. the seductive one, who could make desire feel like armour and intimacy feel like a game she already knew how to win.

i don't hate her.

she was surviving with whatever tools she had at the time, even when some of those tools hurt other people, hurt herself, or simply stopped working. growing up has meant being able to look at her without romanticizing what she did and without treating her like something shameful that needs to be erased.

and now there is this soft girl era Bailey, she is learning that tenderness does not make her less formidable, that softness is allowed to exist beside competence, and that a powerful woman does not have to spend her entire life demonstrating how much pain she can carry without collapsing.

maybe i am done becoming women designed for whatever war i happen to be fighting. i would like to meet the woman i become when there is nothing left to defend.