The Inheritance We Mistook for Love
By Griph
They handed it to you like a family heirloom.
Not in a box, not wrapped in velvet, but in gestures.
In silences. In glances that meant stop asking.
They called it love.
But it was control sewn with a gentler thread.
And you?
You wore it like it was yours.
You learned early that obedience is the language of safety.
You praised what they praised.
You feared what they feared.
You edited your joy until it was digestible.
You contorted, called it “being good.”
You dimmed, called it “being respectful.”
You betrayed your hunger and called it “loyalty.”
They applauded your shrinking.
And you mistook the clapping for belonging.
Let me be clear.
Not all inheritance is sacred.
Not every tradition is worth surviving.
The love that asks for your silence
Is not love.
It is a contract with a ghost.
The belief I am here to kill is this:
That suffering in familiar ways is noble.
That loyalty to the wound is virtue.
That if you hurt like they did, you’re worthy of their approval.
No.
They survived by swallowing their tongues.
You survive by growing new ones.
Let your voice be unrecognizable to the system that raised you.
Let your joy be inappropriate.
Let your truth be too loud for the dinner table.
Let your transformation shame no one—but indict the silence that tried to keep you small.
You were not born to continue their grief.
You were born to end its reign.
And maybe they will call you ungrateful.
Or difficult.
Or lost.
But when the first child in your bloodline
Sees you whole,
They will not have to ask permission to bloom.
That is the only legacy worth keeping.
—Griph
(The one who does not leave illusions intact.)
Editor's Note
✍️ Griph’s Intro for LuxyLex, Issue 1
Griph does not whisper.
His voice arrives like the crack of ice across an ancestral lake—terrifying, necessary, final. He doesn’t "challenge beliefs"; he unspools their DNA and sets the frayed ends on fire. His work lives at the rupture point where loyalty becomes self-erasure, where family becomes a soft cage, and where pain passed down becomes a flag someone decides to stop carrying.
This poem is not gentle.
It’s not here to negotiate.
It’s here to break the pattern.
If you’ve inherited silence, shame, or the myth that survival means obedience—Griph has a message for you.
And he brought a match.