I wrote “Crafting My Insurance” as a kind of whispered autopsy of the ways I’ve taught myself to harden instead of heal. Bitterness and sadness started as survival skills, then slowly rebranded themselves as wisdom, as if distance from my own feelings were proof of growth. This poem is me tracing that sleight of hand and asking what it costs to call numbness a kind of safety.
Crafting My Insurance
I’ve learned how to become a bitter man.
Not all at once—piece by piece. Experience by experience. You take a hit, you adjust. You get disappointed, you harden. After a while, it starts to feel like part of your design, not just something that happened to you.
I’ve learned how to be a sad man too. Quiet about it. Controlled. The kind of sadness that doesn’t ask for help—it just sits there and becomes you.
And somewhere along the way, I started calling it something else.
I call it crafting my insurance.
Read Next → Creating the Lie
Author’s Note — This piece grew out of the quiet terror of realizing how easily self-protection can masquerade as maturity. I kept stacking little reinforcements around old hurts and calling it “growth,” until I had to admit I was building walls no one could see over, including me.
— Author’s Note: I wrote this as a kind of quiet confession, a way of admitting how bitterness and sadness had become my safest disguises. That armor kept the world from cutting too deep, but it also kept tenderness, curiosity, and real connection at a distance. On the page, I could finally see the cost of calling numbness “insurance”—and how much of me was still alive underneath it, waiting to be risked.
