Slow Drip: The Lineage, the Flame, and the Awakening

Going through my old notebook of poems, those ink-soft confessions I wrote as a teenager, I found memories I had forgotten how to name. Lines about longing, fragments of heartbreak, the ache of wanting to be held by someone who could not hold themselves. Back then I believed I was simply writing about young love, the kind that spills easily and burns quickly.

But reading them now with the eyes of a woman who has lived many lives inside one lifetime, I finally recognized the pattern rippling beneath every syllable.

In every relationship, I have been the fixer. The caretaker. The emotional spine. The one who knows how to stay even when staying costs her pieces of herself. I was the one who gave more than she received because somewhere, long before I had language, I learned that this was how love was survived.

And when I zoomed out, far beyond my teenage years and the partners who mirrored the same wound, I saw clearly that this pattern did not begin with me. It did not even begin with my mother. It was a thread stretching back across decades, across generations, across the quiet, unspoken sorrows of the women who came before me. My mother. My grandmother. My great-grandmother. And likely the women before them whose names I never learned but whose pain has sadly always lived in my blood.

This lineage of over-functioning love, of tending the emotional fires of others while ours dim, of believing our worth is something earned and proven and performed, is ancestral. Old. Deep. Almost instinctive, as if we were born knowing how to hold what others refuse to feel.

As I sat there with those poems open on my lap, holding an unreleased breath with tears in my eyes, I felt the weight of a truth I had never dared to claim.

I might be the first one in my lineage willing to process this pain instead of repeating it. Willing to sit with it. Name it. Listen to it. Integrate it. Transform it. Let it remake me instead of destroy me.

And in that realization, the overbearing weight I had been carrying lifted, and something indescribable entered its place. It is strange how grief becomes a portal. Pain becomes a lantern. Patterns become maps.

And little by little, I am glimpsing the first outlines of a life beyond this karmic cycle. A life where love does not require self-erasure. A life where intimacy does not collapse into abandonment. A life where I no longer shrink myself to be chosen. A life where my flame is not smothered but seen.

The Song Beneath the Song

The lyrics for Slow Drip were born from this realization. Not from one single moment of disappointment, but from the entire architecture of a lifetime spent tending embers that were never truly met. The lyrics speaks in metaphor: fire and water, ember and rain. Yet the grief beneath it is ancestral. It is the ache of every woman who ever poured warmth into someone who could not hold it. It is the sorrow of every daughter who learned that closeness is fragile, connection collapses easily, and tenderness is a place where others disappear.

For so long, I thought the slow drip was a kind of love.

Tiny offerings of affection.

Barely-there gestures.

Moments that felt like warmth but vanished as soon as I leaned in.

But the truth is that this slow drip was not nourishment....

It was erosion.

It dampened my fire every time it fell, softening what was once bright and expansive into tired embers that struggled to remember their heat. A drip of affection here, a faint moment of tenderness there, all spaced just enough apart to keep me hoping, yet never enough to help anything grow.

My flame did not fade because I lacked devotion.

It faded because droplets cannot sustain a burning heart.

And a slow drip of love is not love at all.

It is a long quiet dimming.

However, Slow Drip is not only a song about heartbreak. It is a song about awakening. Awakening often begins in the exact place where grief becomes undeniable. When the flame sputters, when the pattern reveals itself, when the drip finally pools at your feet and you see clearly for the first time in your life, that you have been carrying a legacy of emotional scarcity that does not belong in your future.

Music as Medicine

This is why I have been writing again, reclaiming my voice, my sovereignty, my flame. My music is not meant to entertain. My music is meant to awaken. I write the way a healer brews medicine: slow, intentional, woven with truth. Every lyric is a bitter root, a sacred herb, a drop of something potent enough to open the places we keep hidden. The melody becomes the vessel that carries the medicine inward, a gentle invitation to feel what we avoid, to breathe deeper into the places that ache, to remember what we have forgotten about ourselves.

I am not here to create songs that numb. There is plenty of that pushed by traditional media. I am here to create songs that remember. Songs that say the things we spend years avoiding. Songs that speak in the language of the body, of lineage, of fire and shadow, of the quiet ache we normalize until it breaks us open. Songs that turn grief into recognition and recognition into transformation.

The Becoming

As I heal, the music shifts. As I awaken, the lyrics deepen. As I step out of old patterns, I begin to hear my own voice more clearly. Not the voice of the fixer or the caretaker or the one who holds the world together. The voice of the woman I was always meant to be.

Slow Drip is one ember of that becoming. A small flame in the long night of generational healing. A song that holds grief with reverence and turns it into something that glows.

Releasing this song on my birthday felt right in a way that was more instinct than choice. A birthday feels like the return to the original spark, a moment when the universe hands you the mirror of who you have been and who you are becoming. In many ways, Slow Drip is the closing of a long ancestral chapter, the final breath of a pattern I have carried for far too many lifetimes.

Offering it to the world on the day I came into this one feels like a reclaiming of my own fire. It is my way of saying that the girl who was born on this day deserved a love that warmed her, not one that dimmed her. By releasing this work on my solar return, I am choosing to begin my new year not with silence or dimming, but with truth and light. This is my rebirth, written in lyric and flame.

Closing Note

2025 is about to end and in its end, I have come to understand something unexpected. The slow drip that once dampened my embers was never the end of my fire. It was the beginning of my becoming. Every drop of dismissal, every moment of emotional absence, every quiet ache I carried alone concentrated my flame and taught it how to burn with precision rather than desperation.

When a flame learns what it will no longer dim itself for, it becomes something else entirely. What once felt like rain is now the wind at my back. What once smothered my warmth now pushes me toward my own heat. What once weakened me is now the force that makes me rise.

This is the alchemy of healing. The very grief that seemed to extinguish us becomes the breath that ignites us. The slow drip becomes momentum. The dampened ember becomes a torch. The woman who once tended dying coals becomes the blaze she was always meant to be.

I am no longer trying to save a fading fire. I am becoming my own flame.

Uncontained. Undeniable. And finally fully mine.

☥