Inner Child Return
I drift between theories about why we're given breath, given heartbeat, given this particular body in this particular moment. All explanations feel simultaneously too simple and impossibly complex - like trying to cup water or name the exact color of dusk.
But here's what I return to, what feels most true in my chest: We are here for the great undoing.
Each of us carries forward the accumulated weight of what we were taught to become. The careful architecture of acceptable behavior. The intricate maps of who deserves love and who deserves judgment. We inherit these blueprints before we can even speak, before we know there might be other ways to build a life.
And our work—the real work—is to dismantle this inheritance piece by piece. To recognize that the structures we've built around our pain are not permanent dwellings but temporary shelters. To understand that the patterns we repeat, the familiar loops of hurt and protection, were once necessary but need not be eternal.
I know this unwinding intimately. For decades, I perfected the art of avoidance, of swallowing my voice until it became a whisper even I couldn't hear. I learned to be the good girl, the one who bent herself into whatever shape others needed, who confused love with losing herself entirely. Codependence became my native language - I spoke it fluently, unconsciously, desperately. And beneath it all, my heart grew thick skin, a callus born from years of chaos, insecurity, and the particular fear that comes from never knowing if the ground beneath you will hold. Now I'm doing the tender work of removing that protective layer, of teaching my heart it's safe to feel fully again. And it can feel in full while still being unclaimed. The process is excruciating and necessary - like learning to breathe underwater, like discovering you've been holding your breath for decades.
Pain is our most honest teacher. It shows us exactly where we're tender, where we've learned to guard ourselves, where we've confused our wounds with our identity. When pain visits—and it will visit—it asks the most important questions: What are you still trying not to feel? What if this hurt doesn't belong to you personally but to the larger human story? What if your specific suffering is also everyone's suffering?
The child you were before the world taught you fear—that child is still there, waiting beneath all the careful layers of protection. Simple in the way only truth can be simple. Unburdened in the way you were meant to remain unburdened. Soft in the way the world convinced you was dangerous.
Who are you when you set down the identity that pain carved for you? Who emerges when you stop performing the person trauma taught you to become?
This unwinding isn't comfortable. It's the work of a lifetime—returning to who you were before you learned to be anyone else. But maybe that's exactly why we're here: to remember that beneath everything we've accumulated, something essential and unbreakable has been waiting all along.
