Eliza Wilder Writes

06/05/2026

They will tell you addiction killed them. Clinical words. Clean words that fit neatly on death certificates.
Thats not what the family remembers.
The family remembers a laugh, a crooked smile.
The way they danced in the kitchen while making grilled cheese.
The way they carried sleeping children from the car. The nickname only they used.
The sound of their keys in the front door.
The one ordinary day…a phone call.
A knock. The scream.
A silence so large it becomes a room everyone lives inside. An overdose is not a single death.
It is an earthquake that shakes and shatters everyone who loved them. A mother who still checks her phone.
A father who suddenly grows old.
A sister who cannot delete the last text message.
A brother who keeps their number saved anyway.
The children who grow up carrying questions too heavy for small hands.
Why wasn’t I enough? Why didn’t they stay?
Did they love the drugs more than me?
If love alone could save people there would be no funerals. There would be no overdoses.
There would be no children standing beside caskets trying to understand why the strongest person they knew could not survive their own pain. That is the tragedy.
Some wounds bleed inward.
Some monsters learn how to wear human skin.
The years pass.
Birthdays come.
Graduations.
First heartbreaks.
Weddings.
Grandbabies.
Every single joy arrives carrying a shadow.
They should be here. For this ordinary day.
They should be laughing.
They should be sitting in that chair.
They should be growing old with us.
Grief is a strange creature.
It does not leave. It changes shape.
At first it is a tidal wave.
Then it becomes an ocean.
You learn to carry it. You learn to breathe with it.
You learn that love does not end where a heartbeat ends.
Everyone who still remembers becomes a living altar.
A place where the lost are kept.
Not perfectly. Not completely, But enough.
Enough for one more story. One more memory.
Maybe that is the closest thing to resurrection we ever get. Not a body returning. Not a miracle.
Just love refusing to die.

05/29/2026

🦋

05/24/2026

When God Stopped Terrifying Me
By: Eliza Wilder

They gave God my face
only after teaching me to hate it.

Called my hunger sinful.
My body dangerous.
My desire a liability.
My questions rebellion.

They built a cathedral out of fear
and asked me to kneel inside it barefoot.
So I did.

I bled for belonging. Confessed thoughts I should have never been ashamed of.
Apologized for being human.
Offered pieces of myself to an altar
that never seemed full.

And still it wanted more.
More obedience. More silence.
More self-erasure dressed as holiness.

I learned to mistrust my own instincts.
Because what if that was Satan?
What if joy was temptation?
What if pleasure was corruption?
What if my own knowing
was the enemy?
Imagine what that does to a girl.
To be taught the devil might sound like her own voice.
So she learns to sever herself.
Call dissociation devotion.
Call fear discernment.
Call self-abandonment righteousness.
But truth is a patient predator.
It waits in the dark
until your lies grow tired.
And mine did.

Because no God worthy of reverence
requires a woman to disappear to be loved.
No sacred force asks for shame as currency.
No divinity worthy of the word love
needs your terror to feel powerful.

So I went into the ruins.
Not upward. Inward.
And found her there.
Not some soft glittering oracle.
No. A feral thing.
Ancient. Scarred. Honest.
The part of me that survived every man, every doctrine, every story that tried to make me smaller.
She did not speak in commandments.
She asked questions sharp enough to cut:
Is this true? Or is this trauma in ceremonial robes?
Is this devotion? Or learned submission?
Is this intuition? Or the familiar ache of being chosen by danger again?

That is real spiritual work.
Not singing while bleeding.
Not smiling through harm.
Not pretending suffering makes you pure.
The devil?
Maybe he was never a horned beast.
Maybe he was shame.
Maybe he was the voice that taught me love must hurt.
Maybe he was every system that convinced women to call their own extinction sacred.
Maybe hell was never after death.
Maybe hell was living severed from yourself
while calling it faith.

And salvation?
Not rescue.
Recognition.
The moment you stop begging to be forgiven
for existing.
The moment you realize the voice of truth
doesn’t humiliate.
It illuminates.
Now when the sacred speaks it does not threaten me.
It does not count my sins.
It does not demand blood.
It asks only this: Will you tell the truth, even when it costs you the illusion?
Because some altars were built to consume women.
I was never meant to die on mine.

05/24/2026

I Am the Altar
By Eliza Wilder

I do not worship at altars that require my shame.
I burned those temples myself.
My rituals are not built on obedience.
They are built on sovereignty.
Truth.
Consent.
Repair.
Love.
This is my religion now.

Truth—
raw, unperfumed, blood-warm truth.
The kind that cracks open pretty lies
and leaves nothing standing but what is real.
I do not contort to be digestible.
I do not dilute my knowing
to make fragile people comfortable.
My truth is not aggression.
It is self-respect with teeth.

Consent is sacred.
Not implied.
Not assumed.
Not negotiated through guilt, silence, pressure, or longing.
My body is a temple, yes—
but not the kind built for public worship.
It is private holy ground.
No one enters because they desire me.
No one stays because they touched me.
No one claims access because I once loved them.
Access is earned.
Presence is a privilege.
Devotion is invitation only.

Repair—
now that is divine maturity.
Not apology theater.
Not manipulation in soft language.
Not “I’m sorry you felt that way” dressed as accountability.
I mean the kind of repair that kneels in truth and says:
I see the wound.
I see my hand in it.
I am willing to do the sacred work of restoration.
That is power.

And love—
Oh, love.
Love is not submission.
Love is not self-erasure in silk robes.
Love is not abandoning yourself to be chosen.
Love is the fiercest ritual I know.
Love with boundaries sharp as ceremonial blades.
Love with softness that is chosen, never extracted.
Love that protects the inner child and crowns the grown woman.
Love that does not beg.
Love that does not barter.
Love that does not shrink.
I am not here to be saved.
I am here to be sovereign.
If the divine lives anywhere,
it lives in the woman who knows her no is holy,
her yes is intentional,
her healing is ritual,
and her love is a force of nature.
I do not bleed to prove my worth.
I do not offer my suffering as proof of devotion.
I do not confuse sacrifice with love.
I am the altar, not the sacrifice.

04/18/2026

04/16/2026

The Blood and the Altar
By Eliza Wilder

You didn’t come to me with devotion..you came with a hollow in your chest and called it safe.

You came reaching, not to give but to place your weight somewhere softer than yourself.

And I..
God, I opened.
I opened like a temple that forgot not everyone enters to pray.

I gave you my body. Not casually. Not carelessly.
I gave you access.

To warmth. To softness.
To the sacred architecture of a woman who has rebuilt herself more times than she should have had to.

I let you in where men before you had to earn their way through fire.

And you…you laid in my sheets and questioned my worth like it was something you had the authority to measure.

You touched divinity and still found doubt.
That’s not on me.
You said I don’t communicate.

No. I stopped explaining myself to someone committed
to misunderstanding me.

I stopped handing language
to a man who only knew
how to weaponize it.

My silence isn’t absence.
It’s discernment.
It’s the moment a woman realizes her voice is too valuable to be dragged through mud just to be heard.

You said I do what’s best for me. Yes. Finally.

Because I remember what it cost me when I didn’t.

You said I needed your money.
And that’s where I saw you clearly.

Because only a man who doesn’t understand a woman’s power would think she comes from him.

I was building before you.
I will be building after you.

I create from nothing.
I rise from collapse.
I turn loss into language
and pain into something that breathes.

You didn’t make me.
You witnessed me and got uncomfortable.
You didn’t want a woman like me. You wanted something easier.

Something quieter.
Something smaller.
Something that needed you
just enough to make you feel like a man.

You wanted a leash. Not a partner. And then when your fear got loud enough you went nuclear.

“I don’t want a we.”
“I’m done.”
“I don’t want anyone ever again.”

Say it.
Say it all the way.
But don’t throw those words
like grenades and then expect me to stand here and convince you to stay.

I don’t beg for presence
that feels like punishment.
You don’t get to Bleed on me
and call it truth.

Disrespect me and call it stress.
Dismantle my character because you’re unraveling.

Take from me my body, my softness, my time and leave me with questions.

If you were scared, you could have said that.
If you felt small, you could have said that.
If you didn’t know how to hold yourself, you could have said that.

But instead you made me the problem because it was easier than facing yourself.
And me?
I stood there trying to sort through it
wondering if any of it belonged to me.
It didn’t.
I have already survived men who held me just to drop me.

I have already rebuilt
from ashes you wouldn’t know what to do with.

I have already learned that love without respect
is just erosion with a pretty name.

So when you tried to hand me your chaos like it was mine to carry..

I saw it.
And I set it down.
Access denied.
Not your explanation.
Not the woman who absorbs damage so you don’t have to grow.

You didn’t break me.
You revealed yourself.
And me?
I didn’t shatter.
I remembered.
I remembered who I was
before I made space for you.

I remembered what it feels like
to stand in my own power without shrinking to keep someone comfortable.
I remembered that I am not here to be tolerated.
I am here to be met.

And if you cannot meet me fully, honestly, without tearing me down to feel whole
then you don’t get access
to my body,
my energy,
or the sacred space of my becoming.
Crown on.
Door closed.
Altar reclaimed.

04/13/2026

She’s gone.
And there’s nothing poetic about that.

No gentle way to say it.
No “everything happens for a reason” that doesn’t feel like a slap in the face.

She was here
smiling, breathing, living
and now she’s not.

And my body knew.
That “I had a feeling”?
That’s the kind of knowing that lives in your gut, not your head.
The kind you wish you were wrong about.

One minute it’s a picture
faces pressed together, real smiles, real life
and the next it’s a text message that knocks the air out of your chest.

This is the part no one prepares you for:
how fast it flips.
how normal turns into never again.

There’s righteous anger in this kind of grief.
There should be.

Because what the hell.
What the actual hell.

She deserved more time.
More mornings. More chances to be seen, held, understood.
More chances to not feel whatever it was that got so loud inside her that it drowned everything else out.

And you’re left here
loving her in past tense
when you didn’t get a say in when that happened.

That’s the brutality of it.

You don’t get closure.
You get questions.
You get memories that hit at random times.
You get that sick feeling that maybe—just maybe—
you should’ve reached out sooner, said more, done something different.

Let me cut that off right here:
You didn’t cause this.
You couldn’t have controlled this.
And loving her
even from a distance counts.

It counts more than you think.

But this pain?
It needs somewhere to go or it will rot inside you.

So don’t clean it up.
Don’t rush to make it “meaningful.”

Let it wreck you a little.
Let it make you softer in the places you used to be guarded.
Let it make you check on people twice.
Let it make you say the thing instead of waiting.

Because this is what’s real now:
we do not have time to love halfway.

Not anymore.

Say it.
Show it.
Risk it.

Because one day it’s a photo
and the next it’s a text you can’t unread.

And if there’s anything to carry forward from her
anything at all

let it be this:

Don’t wait.

03/08/2026

International Women’s Day
Eliza Wilder

Before highways.
Before driver’s licenses.
Before women were taught to shrink themselves into quiet Sunday prayers…there were women who carried entire worlds inside their bodies.

My grandmother was one of them. She never drove a car but she carried ten souls in her body. Ten.

Ten human lives formed beneath her ribs.
Ten tiny universes built from her blood and bone.
Ten times her body opened the doorway between worlds.

Nine of those children came from a man who broke her. The tenth came from the boss at the cannery.

That one was my mother. My mother never knew her father.

My grandmother was Native and Hispanic — the kind of woman whose intuition moved through her like wind through tall grass. She had healing hands.
The kind that rested on your shoulder just long enough to feel what words couldn’t say.

She used to say she could see the future
the way a stick moves through water.

Not the whole river. Just the ripple first.

Then another. Then the current slowly revealing itself.

Her house was never closed.
There was always another chair at the table.
Another plate placed down.
Another person welcomed in like family.

Everyone belonged.
Even the ones who should never have been there.
Even my uncle. Her son.

The one who molested me. She never saw it.

Or maybe she couldn’t. Some women are raised to believe love means keeping the door open
even when wolves walk inside.

My grandmother spoke only of compassion.
Only of forgiveness.
Only of loving everyone.

She had been abused.
She had been worn down by life.
And still she believed love was the answer.

But I often wonder about the woman she might have been before the world told her what God looked like.

Because somewhere along the way
her mysticism was taken from her.

The intuition.
The knowing in her bones.
The quiet magic in her hands.

Swept away by a religion that told her
the power she carried
was not hers.

That the divine lived somewhere above her.
Not inside her.
Not inside the body that had carried ten souls between worlds.

They taught her to bow.
To worship. To shrink.
To make herself smaller in the presence of something that had always lived within her.

And she folded that part of herself away.

Like so many women did. But power like that does not disappear.

It waits.
It moves through bloodlines like underground water.

And sometimes it rises again
in daughters
and granddaughters
who begin to feel something ancient stirring in their bones.

On International Women’s Day
I don’t just celebrate the women who were allowed to rise.

I honor the women who were never given that chance.
The ones whose magic was buried
under survival
under doctrine
under silence.

Women like my grandmother.
A woman who never drove a car
but carried ten lives into this world.

A woman who welcomed everyone to her table.
A woman whose mysticism was taken
but whose blood still carries it forward.

Because the truth is this:
The divine was never above her.

It was always moving through her.
And now…
it moves through us. 🌙🔥

02/28/2026

🦓 Raw 🖤 by Eliza Wilder

He was born and I was split open
not just my body.
My illusion of control.

Nine fingers.
A heart that needed wires.
Doctors speaking in percentages
while I nodded
like I wasn’t quietly breaking.

I Googled at 2AM
with milk on my shirt
and terror in my throat.

Holt-Oram.
Rare.
A word that felt like
falling through ice.

They wheeled him away once
and I remember thinking
if I lose him
I will not survive it.

No stage lights.
No strong woman speeches.
Just a mother bargaining
with a God she wasn’t sure she trusted.

Pacemaker under baby skin.
Scars where softness should be.
Monitors beeping
like a metronome for my anxiety.

And then

He grew.

He picked up a baseball
with nine fingers
and didn’t flinch.

He learned to switch hands
like adaptation was instinct.
Like difference was strategy.

Meanwhile I was the one
learning how to breathe again.

Rare isn’t poetic
when you’re sitting in cardiology
pretending you understand
what “watch closely” means.

Rare is paperwork.
Insurance calls.
Parking garages.
Smiling at him
so he never sees the fear
that stalks me.

But here’s the part
that wrecks me

He does not see himself
as less.

He does not carry the weight
I carried for him.

He just lives.

Plays first base.
Laughs.
Sleeps.

And every night
when I hear the quiet rhythm
of his mechanical-assisted heart,

I realize something brutal
and holy:

I cannot control the outcome.

I can only love him
ferociously.

Rare stripped me down
to bone and prayer.

And what grew back
was steel. 💛

02/12/2026

Protect the Girl
By Eliza Wilder

Little one…

I know why your throat tightened.
I know why the room blurred
at the edges.

It wasn’t about sponsorship.
It wasn’t about business.
It wasn’t about breakfast.

It was a haircut.
A cadence.
A man who would not meet your eyes.

And your body said,
We have been here before.

Memory does not knock.
It enters.

But listen to me…

You are not fifteen.
You are not married to a man
who needs you small.
You are not in a house
where your truth is rearranged
to fit someone else’s comfort.

You are seated.
Sober.
Breathing.

There is no hand on you.
No corner closing in.
No voice that outranks your own.

Put your hand
on your sternum.

Feel that steady drum?

That is not fear.
That is power remembering itself.

There is a goddess in your chest now.
She was not born in safety.
She was forged.

In meetings.
In therapy rooms.
In nights you chose dignity
over destruction.

She stands behind you
when your body flinches.

She says,
We are safe.
She says,
We are sovereign.
She says,
No man gets to define the air we breathe.

You felt the trigger
and you stayed.

You did not shrink.
You did not fawn.
You did not apologize
for existing.

Sweet girl
that is divine strength.

The men of your past
may flicker through familiar faces.
Their tones may echo.

But you are not theirs anymore.

You are the altar now.
You are the boundary.
You are the woman
who protects the girl.

And she does not bow.

She rises.