This is about learning to be small enough to be loved. About discovering that silence could be safer than honesty, that wanting too much meant losing everything. It’s about how affection can be used as a leash…how withholding becomes a language, and obedience starts to feel like intimacy. I didn’t confuse control for love because I was naïve. I did it because I was trained. Because praise came when I disappeared, and distance felt like something I had earned. This poem is not a confession or an apology. It’s a record. A naming of the moment you realise your hunger was never the problem…only the environment that taught it to beg.

This is what narcissistic love looks like when the mask comes off. Not fists. Not shouting. But being chosen in a way that slowly erases you. They isolate you and call it intimacy. They pedestal you so high you’re afraid to move. They make you feel special in the dark, because light would expose the control. And when you finally question it, suddenly it’s you versus them…never us, never truth. I didn’t fall in love with a person. I fell into a dynamic designed to shrink me. Affection used as leverage. Validation used as currency. “Special” used as a cage lined in velvet. If I sound bitter, I’m not. I’m precise. Because healing begins when you stop romanticising what harmed you. This isn’t about hate. It’s about clarity. And choosing myself back.

When life overwhelms language, art gives it shape. When silence feels safer than speaking, creation becomes a way through. This is not dwelling…this is healing in motion. In The Velvet Cage, art is how we breathe, process, and remember who we are. How we turn pain, love, loss, and becoming into something that can be held. If art has ever helped you survive, you are welcome here. Share, or simply exist alongside us. What was velvet will not silence us.