You weren’t overlooked. You were sacrificed.
Write. Laugh. Hope.
They love to say you slipped.
That somehow, in this polished maze of systems,
you just accidentally fell through.
Like your pain was a clerical error.
A glitch in the machine.
An unfortunate oopsie.
But you know better.
There were hands behind your fall.
Policies. Procedures.
People in power who looked away—or aimed.
You didn’t fall.
You were funneled.
You were filtered.
You were chosen for erasure the second you didn’t fit the mold
they were willing to save.
Too complicated.
Too brown.
Too poor.
Too loud.
Too female.
Too queer.
Too anything-but-comfortable.
And when you screamed for help,
they blamed the echo.
This wasn’t a failure of the system.
This was the system.
And you were its offering.
But you didn’t disappear.
You got louder.
You crawled out.
You wrote it all down.
Write. Laugh. Hope.
Because calling it a “crack” doesn’t make the shove any less violent.
