None of This Is Who You Are

There is a specific kind of confusion that comes from growing up in a home where love had conditions.

You do not know it is confusion at the time. It just feels like life. Like the way things are. Like the way you are supposed to be.

You learn early that your job is to manage the mood in the room. To read the temperature before you speak. To make yourself useful enough, quiet enough, good enough that today will be a safe day.

You get very good at it. You have to.

The strange thing about this kind of childhood is that it does not always look broken from the outside. There are dinners and birthdays and school runs. There are moments of warmth that confuse you because they make you think maybe you imagined the rest.

You did not imagine the rest.

What you learned was a survival system. Apologise before anyone asks you to. Shrink before anyone tells you to. Call the anxiety love because love is what it was supposed to be.

By the time you are an adult you have been running this system for so long you cannot tell where it ends and you begin.

You say sorry when someone bumps into you.

You feel guilty for having needs.

You go quiet when you disagree because quiet feels safer than conflict.

You confuse peace with silence. You think if nobody is angry, everything is fine. You have never learned that calm is supposed to be the baseline, not the reward for good behaviour.

You are exhausted in a way you cannot fully explain to people who grew up differently. Not from doing too much. From being vigilant for too long.

Here is what I want to say to you.

None of this is your personality. None of this is who you are. It is what you learned in order to be safe in a place that should have been safe without you having to work for it.

You were a child. You needed love and you adapted to whatever version of it was available. That is not weakness. That is the most human thing there is.

The work now, if you choose it, is to learn the difference between who you are and what you were trained to be. To notice when you apologise for something that is not your fault. To catch yourself shrinking and ask why. To let yourself take up space in a room and stay there even when it feels uncomfortable.

It is slow work. It is uncomfortable work. And it is the most important thing you will ever do.

Because on the other side of it is a version of you that nobody installed. The original one. The one who exists without conditions.

She has been waiting a long time.

rise · believe · fly 🪶

From the Ashes She is for the woman in the middle of it. Not after. If this found you today, you are exactly where you are supposed to be.

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