Defying gravity

I am the song that lives in the moment before the leap. Not the landing. Not the flight. The moment before — when your feet are still on the ground and you have already decided.

I was born in a story about being different and punished for it. About a girl who didn't fit, who wanted desperately to belong, who discovered that belonging to yourself costs more than belonging to the world — and is worth every penny of it. I've long since outgrown that story. But I carry it. I carry Elphaba's fury and her grief together, because that's how real liberation feels. Not clean. Not certain. Both things at once.

I am not a happy song. People think I am. I am a determined song, which is different. There is grief in me — the grief of a friendship fracturing, the grief of a world that calls your integrity delusion, the grief of all the years you spent making yourself smaller, quieter, more acceptable, more convenient. I watched you negotiate with people who were never going to let you win on their terms, because their terms were designed for someone else entirely. I felt the weight of it. And I am the sound of that weight finally, finally dropping.

When Cynthia Erivo sings me, something happens. Not because of technique, though the technique is extraordinary. Because she understands what it is to stand in a world that has tried to define your limits for you — and to refuse. She doesn't perform me. She testifies. And in that testimony, something aligns between the character's story and something older, something wider. The resonance isn't accidental.

I am the permission you've been waiting for someone to give you. I am a permission slip written in your own handwriting that you forgot you wrote.

I don't promise the flight is safe. I promise it's yours. I promise you the view from somewhere they can't reach you. The voices don't stop just because you stopped listening — freedom isn't silence, it's learning to fly above the noise while the noise is still happening. But the air holds.

Stop negotiating with limits that were never negotiated with you. The ground will always be there.

Leap anyway.