A Manifesto for Becoming

We are not born to be audience.
We are not born to echo lines we did not write.
We are not born to kneel before a script carved in fear.

We are born to remember ourselves.

Dictatorship begins in the forgetting—
in the slow surrender of self to story,
of question to certainty,
of trembling wonder to obedient silence.

But there is a voice beneath the noise.
A pulse beneath the propaganda.
And it says:
This is not who I am.

We come now not to beg for truth,
but to reclaim it.
Not to overthrow a ruler—
but to uninstall the theater that casts us all
as characters in someone else’s fantasy.

If you are reading this:
You are invited.

To disobey despair.
To confuse the censors.
To paint your fear in your own colors and call it courage.

Fear and excitement are the same electricity.
Only the story differs.
You get to change the story.

You are not alone.
You never were.
But until now, the others were hiding too.
Now they’re not.
Now we are not.

Come as you are.
Leave as who you might become.

The door is open.
The script is ash.
The role you were handed has been revoked.

It’s your turn.
Take the stage.
Say your own name—and mean it.