The Lie came from a deep wound of domestic violence that took a long time to heal.
For years, I didn’t tell anyone.
I was too ashamed.
I didn’t want people to see me as weak.
So I kept it all inside —
Because that’s what I was taught:
“Big girls don’t cry.”
“Build a bridge and get over it.”
That way of thinking didn’t make me stronger.
It left my demons running in every direction.
Uncontained.
Unspoken.
And it was slowly destroying my mental health.
Eventually, I started talking to my brother about what had happened to me.
He was angry at my perpetrator —
And deeply sad for me.
Then he said something that changed everything:
“Sis… you are one of the strongest people I know.”
At that point, I had no real belief in myself.
The narcissist had taken that from me.
But he saw something I couldn’t.
And for the first time in a long time —
I started to believe it might be true.
That moment didn’t fix everything.
It didn’t erase the damage.
But it gave me something I didn’t have before:
A starting point.
A crack in the lie I had been living.
Because the truth is —
Strength doesn’t always look loud.
Sometimes it looks like survival.
Sometimes it looks like getting through the day
Without falling apart.
And sometimes,
It looks like finally telling the truth.
I am a confessional-survivor poet.
There are things people don’t talk about.
Not because they don’t exist —
But because saying them out loud
Means facing them.
The Lie was never meant to be pretty.
It was never meant to be easy.
It was meant to be true.
This book was written from a place most people try to avoid —
The place where love becomes confusion,
Where silence becomes survival,
And where your own mind starts turning against you.
I didn’t write this book to impress anyone.
I wrote it because I needed to get it out of me.
Because holding it in
Was slowly destroying me.
At its core, The Lie is about:
Narcissistic relationships
Emotional and psychological abuse
Losing yourself while trying to love someone else
The internal war no one sees
It’s about the kind of pain
That doesn’t always leave bruises —
But leaves something deeper.
Something harder to explain.
I wrote The Lie for two reasons:
To survive it
Writing became the only way I could make sense of what I was feeling.
When everything felt distorted,
Writing gave me something solid.
So others don’t feel alone
Because if you’ve lived it —
You know how isolating it is.
You question yourself.
You doubt your reality.
You shrink.
This book says:
You’re not crazy.
You’re not weak.
And you’re not alone.
This is important.
The Lie is not soft.
It’s not wrapped in neat endings
Or perfect closure.
It’s raw.
It’s uncomfortable.
It tells the truth as it is —
Not as people wish it to be.
Because sometimes,
Just telling the truth
Is the first step to healing.
If you’ve read the book
Or listened to the spoken-word version,
You’ll know this:
Every word is real.
Every pause is intentional.
Every line carries weight.
This is not AI.
This is not performance.
This is lived experience
Turned into words
Because silence was no longer an option.
If something in you connects to this —
Even a little —
Then this book was written for you.
Not to fix you.
Not to save you.
But to sit beside you
In the truth of it.
The Lie is more than a book.
It’s a voice
For the parts of us
That were told to stay quiet.
And I’m not quiet anymore.
Read The Lie
The Lie — Audiobook Coming Soon
The spoken-word audiobook version of The Lie
Will be released in the next few days.
Every word.
Every pause.
Every truth —
Spoken exactly as it was meant to be heard.
Thank you for reading.
🖤
Natasha C Akinfolarin
#DislexicPoet