Eliza Wilder Writes

08/30/2026

08/30/2026

⚠️ Content warning: domestic violence, sexual coercion and abuse.

Women are taught that forgiveness is the price of freedom.
I don’t believe that anymore.
This is not a revenge poem.
It is a return-to-sender.
My staying belongs to me. My begging belongs to me.
My terrible need to be chosen belongs to me. But his lies were never mine. His betrayal was never mine.
His violence was never mine.

I can own my part without carrying his. I can heal without making what happened holy. And I can let him go without forgiving him. For every woman who protected the person hurting her because she had forgotten how to protect herself:

You were never weak.
But you deserve to leave the grave.

I DO NOT FORGIVE YOU
By Eliza Wilder

07/11/2026

TIGER ROOMS
by Eliza Wilder

I keep building rooms for the things inside me that would rather have teeth than names.

I keep convincing myself that if I can lock them away long enough, they’ll forget they were ever wild.

I call it healing because survival sounds too honest.

The beach never lies.

It keeps dragging back everything I buried with my own hands, smoothing the edges just enough to remind me that nothing stays gone.

Salt remembers what denial forgets.

Someone says I’m only bleeding because I wasn’t chosen.

Maybe.

Maybe they’re confusing the match with the wildfire.

Some wounds were already waiting for a face to wear.

The tiger isn’t somewhere out there.

It’s been pacing beneath my ribs this whole time, wearing grooves into bone, waiting for me to decide whether I’m the one holding the key…

or the one who built the room.

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.

04/16/2026

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.