Zaie

WHY I WRITE

I don’t write for fame.
I write because I don’t know how not to.

Because somewhere, there’s a kid crying on their bedroom floor thinking no one will ever understand the kind of ache they carry.
And I want to be the voice slipping through the silence whispering:

“Hey… you’re not alone. I’ve felt that too.”

I write for the kids who were told they’re a sin.
For the addicts who relapse and still deserve softness.
For the people who never learned what it feels like to be safe in their own body, their own mind, their own damn heartbeat.

I write because I needed someone to do it for me.
And nobody did.

Writing became the reason I stayed alive.

Because silence was suffocating.
Because pain with no exit turns into poison.
Because there are people out there who need these words as desperately as I once did.

This has never been about perfection.
It’s about truth.
Ugly, trembling, gut-deep truth.

I write for the ones who were told they were too much.
Too loud.
Too broken.

For the people rebuilding themselves from ashes and apology.
For anyone who’s ever stared into a mirror and didn’t recognize the person looking back.

I wasn’t raised to take up space.
I was raised to be small. Quiet. Obedient. Ashamed of my own shadow.

For years, I played the part they scripted for me:
the “good kid,” the rule-follower, the one who smiled on cue while cracking silently underneath.

But truth doesn’t stay buried.
It leaks.
It spills.
And for me, it bled out in lyrics.

I grew up with my heart split clean in two between the version of me they demanded and the version of me that was dying to breathe.

I carried religious guilt like a second spine.
Wore manipulation like a jacket I couldn’t take off.
Battled identity loss, dysmorphia, addiction, dissociation.
A whole storm trapped inside one body.

Some days I still stare at my reflection and feel like the real me never fully made it to the surface.

But music let me scream.

It let me break without apologizing.
It let me tell the truth without whispering.
It became the one place where I wasn’t too much or not enough.

Just human.
Raw and bleeding and honest.

Writing songs helped me rebuild a self that was actually mine.
Not carved by fear.
Not shaped by shame.
Not softened for anyone else’s comfort.

A self that is messy, loud, broken, tender, queer, angry, loving, and real as hell.

This isn’t just music.

This is survival.
This is the lifeline I threw myself when disappearing felt easier than breathing.

I didn’t choose this path.
I clung to it.

And somehow… it saved me.
ZAIE to the boy I buried i still think about you sometimes. the version of me who laughed without apologizing for being loud. the one who hadn’t learned how to shrink himself yet. you were soft in a world that sharpened everything. they handed you shame like it was inheritance. taught you silence before they taught you safety. and somewhere between church pews, bathroom floors, and sleepless nights staring at ceilings begging god to make you different, i lost you. or maybe i buried you myself just to survive. but some nights i hear your voice through the static in my headphones still asking me why i became so afraid of taking up space. i don’t know how to answer.
Zaie things i never said sober i loved people like a flood loves a coastline. recklessly. completely. until there was nothing left of me that hadn’t been carried away. and every time somebody touched my heart gently i panicked. because pain was familiar. and softness felt temporary. so i learned how to leave first. how to disappear emotionally before anybody could watch me fall apart in real time. there are ghosts of conversations still living inside me. apologies i rehearsed in bathroom mirrors. confessions i drowned in cheap liquor. truths i only knew how to say when my hands were shaking. i think some people still carry versions of me that i don’t recognize anymore. and honestly? that breaks my heart too.
ZAIE if heaven could hear me now i spent years terrified that love would disqualify me from heaven. terrified that every heartbeat i couldn’t control was another reason for god to look away. so i prayed myself raw. begged for holiness until my knees ached and my reflection started feeling like evidence. but no matter how hard i tried i could never hate myself enough to become who they wanted. and maybe that was never failure. maybe surviving was the miracle. maybe heaven was never supposed to feel like fear wrapped in scripture. maybe god sounds less like condemnation and more like the quiet voice inside me saying: you deserved love before anybody taught you shame.
the shape of disappearing i mastered the art of becoming smaller. smaller opinions. smaller dreams. smaller versions of myself that fit easier into other people’s comfort. i learned how to laugh softly, cry privately, ache invisibly. and eventually i became so good at disappearing that even i couldn’t find myself anymore. there are years of my life that feel blurred at the edges. like i survived them without ever fully arriving inside them. sometimes i wonder how many pieces of me were sacrificed just to keep the peace. how many versions of myself died quietly before i finally understood that survival and living are not the same thing. now i’m trying to rebuild a person from the ashes of all the selves i was never allowed to become. it’s slow. it’s ugly. it hurts. but for the first time in my life the person in the mirror looks a little less like a stranger.
for the kid crying in secret i know you think nobody notices. the shaking hands. the fake smiles. the way your chest tightens every time somebody says “you seem fine.” i know what it feels like to carry entire storms inside your body while the world keeps expecting sunshine. i know what it’s like to sit on the bathroom floor at 2am trying to survive your own thoughts without waking the house. and i know how badly you want someone to look at you without trying to fix you first. so listen to me carefully: you are not weak for surviving in survival mode. you are not broken because pain changed you. and you are not difficult to love just because people failed to love you correctly. one day you’ll realize the soft parts of you were never the problem. they were proof that the world didn’t harden you completely. hold onto that.
HAILVANT THE CHURCH TAUGHT ME HOW TO HATE MYSELF they dressed fear in white robes called it holiness then handed it to children like communion. DRINK. SWALLOW. REPENT. they taught me my body was dangerous before i even understood what desire was. taught me to fear my reflection like it was possessed. so i learned how to split myself in half. one side begging for salvation. the other fantasizing about setting the whole cathedral on fire. funny how they call rage a sin after building it carefully inside you for years. i don’t kneel anymore. if god wants to hear me now he’ll have to find me through the distortion.
A LOVE LETTER TO THE FIRE the fire never lied to me. people did. religion did. mirrors did. but fire? fire was honest. it told me exactly what it touched. exactly what it ruined. exactly what it couldn’t save. so when the world tried to turn me into silence i became something louder. 808s shaking like panic attacks. blood-red lights. teeth hidden behind a mask. a nervous breakdown dancing under strobe lights. i stopped asking the flames to spare me. instead i learned how to look beautiful while burning alive.
HOLY STATIC i think there’s something holy about surviving yourself. about waking up after nights that should’ve swallowed you whole and still finding enough breath to scream. my life became feedback loops. distorted memories. half-finished prayers rotting underneath basslines. somewhere between addiction and identity loss i stopped trying to become clean. clean was never an option for people like me. so i became real instead. real rage. real grief. real desire. real chaos. and if my music sounds violent sometimes it’s because silence almost killed me. so turn the volume up louder. i need to know the void can hear me back.
IF GOD MADE ME WRONG THEN WHY AM I BEAUTIFUL they told me holiness was silence. head down. mouth shut. desire buried deep enough to stop frightening other people. but every time i looked in the mirror i saw something alive in me they couldn’t kill. something sharp. something starving. something beautiful in a way they didn’t know how to control. so they called it sinful instead. because humans fear things that refuse to shrink themselves. i spent years trying to carve pieces off myself just to fit inside their version of acceptable. less queer. less angry. less loud. less me. but repression mutates. eventually all that swallowed rage grew teeth. now i wear my chaos openly. like stained glass lit on fire. like lipstick smeared across a warning label. and honestly? if god made me wrong then why do i feel most divine when i stop apologizing for existing?
THE MASK EATS TOO people think the mask hides me. it doesn’t. it reveals the parts of me politeness kept chained up. the hunger. the violence. the need to be witnessed loudly after years of disappearing quietly. behind the distortion and flashing lights there’s still a person underneath all this noise. a terrified one. because anger is easier to perform than grief. because screaming feels stronger than admitting how badly i wanted to be loved gently. so i built something monstrous enough to protect me. and somewhere along the way the mask stopped feeling separate from my skin. now every time the bass shakes the room i feel it feeding. every chant. every drop. every voice screaming the lyrics back at me like they finally understand what it means to survive ugly. maybe that’s the real horror of it all: the mask was never hiding the monster. it was hiding the wound.