Life gets noisy.
Everyone has an opinion,
a warning, a demand, a version of who you should be.
But don’t let the noise
Decide who you are.
-Mandy Ricks
Tag: Creative Writing
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Life gets noisy
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Ordinary hours
Some days, healing looks less like rising
and more like refusing to disappear.There are mornings when the heart wakes slowly,
still carrying pieces of yesterday.Not every battle announces itself.
Some arrive quietly,
wearing ordinary hours. -
Crawl
If all you can do today is crawl,
know this:
your heart will still hold you together
and guide you
like an ancient faith that never fades.-Mandy Ricks
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The story doesn’t
Sometimes, like last night, trauma resurfaces in dreams.
The monsters are disguised as other people, but they always end up hurting and abandoning.
Faces change.
The story doesn’t.Different voices.
Different places.
The same ache.The mind revisits old wounds not because it wants to suffer,
but because some part of us is still trying to understand what happened.Morning comes.
The dream fades.But the truth remains:
I survived every monster I ever met.-Mandy Ricks
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Running
I spent years trying to outrun myself.
Racing, panting, hiding.
Taking the back roads,
creating hollow shadows.Grasping at survival.
Moving fast enough
that the ghosts
couldn’t quite catch me.But what I didn’t know
was they were wearing my face.And sooner or later
every road ended
with me.-Mandy Ricks
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Those that walked before us
Those that walked before us were not heroes.
Just people trying to survive.
Some broke, healed, or did a bit of both.
They carried grief.
Made mistakes.
Loved imperfectly.Still, they kept going.
Maybe that is the real inheritance.
Not perfection.
-Mandy Ricks
A few lines from my daughter, EJ.
“And that’s what makes both sides human
There was never a battle to be fought
No lines in the sand to be drawn
Just two sides of the same coin
That if they let it, the tide would take and wash away regardless.”
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Peace
Peace doesn’t always arrive as happiness.
Sometimes it arrives as nothing needing to be fixed for a little while.-Mandy Ricks
(with Willow)
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Shelter
Peace isn’t always found in grand places.
Sometimes it’s a small shelter, a familiar view, and knowing you’re safe enough to watch the world instead of run from it—learning that not every battle has to be fought.
-Mandy Ricks
Inspired by Willow, (my cat), Chief of Security, Keeper of the Coffee Table Fortress, and Watcher of All Things.
Willow -
Get back up
Life is hard,
cruel.
Scars never stop aching.
But a point in time comes
where survival hardens into something dangerous —
something that gets back up-bleeding,
smoke in its lungs,
determined to set fire
to anything that tries to bury it again.-Mandy Ricks
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Difficult
People called her difficult
without ever knowing what she had survived.They saw sharp edges,
but not the hidden shaking,
the resentment burning low in her chest.She learned to hide it all behind polite smiles
and half-finished replies.There were nights she stayed alive out of nothing but spite.
Days she moved through ordinary conversations
while entire sections of her were quietly collapsing behind the walls.Still,
she kept something alive in herself.Not hope.
Not happiness.Just a small stubborn refusal
to become as cold as the people who hurt her.And honestly,
that probably saved her life.-Mandy Ricks
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Change
Change never arrives gently.
It carves through you slowly
until one day
it catches you
mid-sentence, mid-cigarette, mid-grief—and you realize
the person staring back
no longer looks easy to destroy.—
-Mandy Ricks
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Winters
Cars moved.
Coffee steamed behind the glass.
Somewhere, someone laughed too loudly.
The old man kept walking toward the shop,
carrying all his winters at once.-Mandy Ricks
Mandy Ricks 