by 
She doesn’t look like an addict,
They say with narrowed eyes.
She looks like someone’s mother,
Someone kind, who bakes, who tries.
She doesn’t fit the picture,
She’s not the type you’d fear.
She wears her shame in silence,
And hides it with good cheer.
They don’t see her at midnight,
Staring at her phone.
Chasing wins that won’t come,
Losing more, alone.
They don’t hear the stories
She tells to dodge the shame,
How she borrows, how she bargains,
How she slowly lost her name.
Because women aren’t supposed to fall
In ways that feel like vice—
We’re meant to hold the family up,
Not gamble rent, not roll the dice.
We’re carers, wives, dependable.
We hold the world up straight.
But no one asks the woman
Why her hands still shake.
No one sees her drowning
Beneath her painted face,
Too scared to say “I need help,”
Too scared to leave her place.
She thinks they’ll call her selfish,
A failure, weak, a mess.
So she gambles with her silence,
And prays no one will guess.
But help doesn’t come with fireworks,
It starts with broken breath—
A whisper in a sterile room,
“Please save me from this death.”
She counts the days in silence,
Each hour she doesn’t cave.
Each trigger faced and walked past —
Another soul she saves.
She sits in rooms with others,
Their stories mirror hers.
Different names, same aching hearts,
Same storm beneath the slurs.
And though she’s still rebuilding,
Still shaky, sore, unsure —
There’s steel beneath her softness now,
A strength she can’t ignore.
She still gets waves of craving,
Still hears that old cruel call,
But now she speaks back softer:
“I won’t go back at all.”
She’s proof that shame can soften,
That wounds can turn to grace.
A quiet kind of warrior
With fire behind her face.
She used to beg in silence,
For someone else to see,
That under all the smiling,
She was screaming to be free.
She’d scrub the kitchen spotless,
Try to make it all feel right,
While guilt dripped down like poison
In the quiet of the night.
She buried every secret,
Behind receipts and lies,
Each win a fleeting flicker,
Each loss a slow demise.
But piece by piece she’s rising,
Though the world still casts its stone.
She’s writing her own ending now —
And this time, not alone.
She doesn’t owe the world a thing,
Not proof, not polished grace.
Survival is her protest now,
And joy is her embrace.
So if you see her crying,
Don’t judge the tears she hides.
She’s walking through a warzone
That’s shredded her insides.
And maybe she looks polished,
Put-together, kind, and neat—
But she’s a woman in recovery,
Still learning to stand on her feet.