The Unfinished Song: On Becoming What They Cannot See

​Editorial: Literary Liberation: The Unfinished Song: On Becoming What They Cannot See by Ruben Camp White I’ve spent too many days letting other people’s doubt become my daily bread. The naysayers filled my head with smoke until I couldn’t see my own hands reaching, couldn’t remember I had the right to dream out loud. They measured me by my circumstances—my zip code, my yesterday, the weight of what they thought they saw written on my face. They made me a fixed thing, a settled matter, guilty of hoping and accused of trying.But there’s a drum beneath my chest that never stopped beating, even when I begged it to. That drum whispers the truth they can’t hear: I am not my circumstances. I am my possibilities. I come from people who made songs out of chains, who turned No into Not Yet, who planted gardens in the footnotes of history and fed whole generations on what nobody thought would grow.Today I choose the knowing. I’m loosening the knot of their words and stepping out of the story where I only play small. I am not the sum of their subtraction. I am the equation they couldn’t solve because they kept measuring me by my wounds instead of my wingspan, by my scars instead of my stars. Possibility doesn’t ask permission—it grows in the cracks of concrete certainty, green and stubborn as grass that won’t be paved over.I’m done convincing them. I’m too busy becoming, too busy turning circumstances into circumstantial, too busy doing anything and everything with this one wild, precious, doubted, undowngradeable life. The song isn’t over yet. And I’m the singer, not the song they sing about me.#RubenCampWhite #SelfWorth #OvercomingDoubt #PossibilityOverCircumstance #Resilience