When Your Feelings Were Never Safe at Home

“The fuel of life is feeling. If we’re not filled up in childhood, we must fill ourselves as adults.” ~Jonice Webb, author of Running on Empty

I was nine years old the first time I taught myself how to disconnect completely from my emotions.

It started with a secret I wasn’t supposed to tell, a classroom that turned on me by lunchtime, and a mother who had nothing left to give me the exact moment I needed her most. By the end of that day, I understood the one rule my whole family lived by, even though nobody had ever said it out loud: a feeling was only acceptable if it didn’t inconvenience anyone else.

Here’s how the day went. My best friend confided in me her juicy secret: over the past weekend, a boy from our class had walked her into the coat closet at the YMCA, kissed her, and told her he loved her. She made me swear never to tell a soul. I made it less than a day before I blabbed it to the biggest mouth in our class, the way nine-year-olds do, thinking a secret is just a story you haven’t shared yet.

By lunchtime, everyone knew. By last period, my best friend and the most popular girl in our class, a girl who’d spent months making me believe we were close until she quietly set the trap that ended it, had turned almost the entire class against me.

I spent the rest of the day crying in my teacher’s office because as far as I understood the world at age nine, my life had officially ended.

What actually broke something in me wasn’t my best friend turning on me and joining forces with the mean girls, and it wasn’t ninety percent of my class deciding I didn’t belong, either.

It was what happened later that same day.

I was a latchkey kid, so I came home from school and sat with that feeling completely alone for hours. When my mother finally walked in the door, I did the one thing a nine-year-old is supposed to be able to do: I reached for her. I needed her to hold space for me on what felt like the worst day of my life.

She told me, sharply, that she didn’t have time for this shit, and I needed to get over myself. That’s the sentence that actually caused my collapse.

Not the mean girls. Her.

I remember walking into the bathroom afterward, closing the door, and sinking onto a little step stool in there. I cradled my head in my hands and rocked myself back and forth. I don’t know how long I sat there.

I recall reaching for something deep inside myself, a quiet, empty space, and pulling it forward until the crying stopped and something else took over. I believe that was the first day I learned how to leave my own body when a feeling got too big for the room. It wouldn’t be the last.

For someone who held feelings as deeply as I did, that was almost more than I could bear.

I didn’t have language for the depth and breadth of my emotional pain until much later, when I learned I’m a highly sensitive person: someone whose nervous system takes in and processes information more deeply than most people’s does. It’s not a mood, and it’s not my preference, either. It’s simply how I’m built. And it meant I felt things at a volume other people in my house weren’t equipped to handle.

Which might explain why an environment where feelings were treated as a weakness and a problem to be solved didn’t just bruise me a little. It shaped who I let get close to me, the breadcrumbs I was willing to accept, and how small I was willing to make myself to keep the peace.

It took decades to trace that thread all the way back to that bathroom floor. Underneath the people-pleasing and that low hum of never-quite-enough that followed me into every relationship I chose, there was shame and a constant, quiet sense that I was unworthy at my core.

I never married. For most of my adult life, I mistook familiar for love, because familiar was the only definition of love I’d ever been handed.

What shaped me the most wasn’t the fourth-grade class rejection, or the mean girls, or even that one afternoon in the bathroom. It was about what happened every single time after that, when a nervous system that never got to fully calm down stayed locked in survival mode long after the danger had passed—for years.

I used to think this was just how my immediate family was: people who never learned how to hold space for someone else’s feelings. I didn’t think much more about it than that.

Then one afternoon, one of my uncles told me something that rearranged everything I thought I understood about my extended family. He said, plainly, that he and his wife had decided early on to adopt all of their children rather than have biological ones because his side of the family, which is also my family, carried what he called a long-running streak of mental illness that he refused to risk passing down.

Gently but seriously, he told me I might want to consider the same thing for myself, for the same reason. That’s when I stepped back and saw the bigger picture.

It wasn’t just about my mom, dad, and sister. It was a whole family’s operating system, one generation quietly handing the wiring down to the next, unnamed and untreated, until somebody finally decided the safest thing to do was stop the line altogether.

That wiring has a name. Researchers link exactly that kind of environment, one where feelings are consistently dismissed or punished, to how conditions like borderline and narcissistic personality disorder take root: some children grow up unable to regulate emotion at all, while others learn to bury the real self so deep they build a false one instead, one that never has to feel anything as inconvenient as a genuine need.

It turns out, I ended up making the same calculation my uncle had. I never had kids. It’s one of the sadder, more regretful costs of growing up in a house that couldn’t hold space for you when you needed it most.

I’m fifty-nine now, and it’s taken most of my life to understand that none of what happened to me as a nine-year-old crying in a teacher’s office was ever really about that one bad day. It was about a family that never learned the true value of emotionally supporting someone when they are expressing their feelings.

I still have to remind myself some days that a big feeling isn’t a burden. It’s just information; actually, it’s extremely valuable data, and it’s allowed to take up space.

What I know now that I didn’t know sitting on that footstool on that bathroom floor is this: I get to be the person who holds space for me. Nobody handed me that skill. I built it myself, slowly, mostly by learning to notice the moment I want to disappear into that old, quiet emptiness and choosing to remain present in my body instead.

Some days I still don’t manage it as well as I should, but most days, now, I do. That’s not a small thing. That’s the whole rebuild, and I’m so proud of what I’ve become.

Somewhere in the middle of that rebuild, something in me finally snapped—not broke; it snapped awake. I let myself get angry, really angry, once I could see clearly that what I’d absorbed as “normal” in that house had been toxic the whole time. That anger is what put me on the path to figuring the rest of it out, piece by piece, the same way I’m telling you about it right now.

These days, holding space for myself looks like this: it looks like spending my days writing about the very thing that once made me disappear into a dense fog; that quiet, empty, fuzzy and unfeeling part of myself. It’s become my raison d’être, my heart song, the thing that gets me out of bed every morning when nothing else could.

Nobody held space for me back then. So now, I lovingly hold it for other people who are standing exactly where I once stood.

If any of this resonates with your story, you’re not alone, and you didn’t deserve to be treated this way.  Don’t ever give up on yourself. You’re a beautifully crafted, deeply emotional masterpiece who deserves to have that space lovingly held around you; and once you start holding it for yourself, you’ll show the world exactly how you should be treated.

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About Stephanie Roese

Stephanie Roese is a trauma‑informed author and digital creator whose work helps survivors understand emotional neglect, gaslighting, and narcissistic abuse. She recently published the eBook, Decoding Covert Abuse:  The 50 Tactics You Were Never Meant to See. Stephanie also creates free healing tools and resources that offer clarity, validation, and support for anyone rebuilding self‑trust. Explore more of her work at https://unseenscars.vip and https://blog.unseenscars.vip.

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The Wholeness I Found When I Lost Someone I Love

“The wound is the place where the Light enters you.” ~Rumi

The room didn’t change when she left. The chair was where it had always been, angled toward the window the way she liked it. What changed was that I could finally see the shape of the thing I’d been leaning on, now that it wasn’t there to lean on anymore.

For a long time, I called what I felt “love,” and some of it was. But underneath the grief was something I was slower to admit. A lot of what I missed wasn’t her. It was the version of me that existed when she was in the room. The one who didn’t have to sit alone with his own mind. The one who felt steady because someone else was holding the other end of the rope.

I think we do this more than we know. We meet someone, and without deciding to, we hand them a piece of ourselves to keep safe. Our sense of being okay. Our reason to get up. The quiet certainty that we matter to somebody.

It feels like intimacy, and sometimes it is. But it can also be a kind of outsourcing. We give away the parts of ourselves that feel too heavy to carry, and we call the arrangement love, and then one day the person leaves or dies or simply changes, and we discover we’d been storing essential things in a house that was never ours.

That was the hardest part of losing her. Not the missing, which I expected. The disorientation. I kept reaching for steadiness and finding the place where it used to be. It was like coming home to a room and reaching for a light switch that someone had moved.

I want to be careful here, because grief advice has a way of rushing people. Someone is barely standing, and we hand them a lesson, as if the lesson will make the weight lighter. It won’t. The first thing loss asks of us is not insight. It’s permission to actually feel it.

I spent months trying to think my way out of the ache before I understood that the ache was not a problem to be solved. It was information. It was showing me, with a precision nothing else could, exactly where I’d been living outside myself.

So I stopped trying to manage it. I let it stay. I let it be as large as it was. And slowly, in the staying, something underneath the grief began to speak.

What it said was this: the steadiness you’re grieving was never actually hers to give. She didn’t install it in you. She reminded you it was there.

The warmth, the sense of being enough, the quiet at the center—those were yours the whole time. You just got into the habit of only feeling them in her presence, and so you came to believe she was their source. She wasn’t. She was a window. And losing a window is a real loss, a painful one, but it is not the same as losing the light.

I’m not saying we don’t need each other. We do. I am not one of those people who treats independence as the highest virtue and intimacy as a weakness. We are made for connection, and a life without it is a smaller life.

What I am saying is narrower and, I think, more useful. The love that costs us ourselves is not the deepest kind. The deepest kind is the love we can give from a self that is already whole, rather than the love we reach for to become whole. One of those is a gift. The other is a transaction we’ve dressed up as devotion.

The difference is hard to see from inside a good relationship, because everything is working. You only find out which kind you had when it ends. If the person leaves and you grieve, that’s love. If the person leaves and you disappear, that’s the part of you that you’d handed over, coming due.

For me, healing didn’t look dramatic. It looked like learning to sit in the same room I used to share, alone, and not flee.

It looked like noticing the moment my mind reached for her to feel okay and staying with the discomfort instead of chasing relief. It looked like a hundred small refusals to outsource myself again. None of it felt like progress while it was happening. It felt like sitting in an empty room. But that is, I’ve come to believe, what the work actually is. You stay long enough that the room stops feeling empty and starts feeling like yours.

There’s a strange gift buried in this, and I almost don’t want to name it because it can sound like I’m tidying up the pain. I’m not. But it’s true: loss returned me to myself.

It made me go looking inside for the things I’d been getting from outside, and to my surprise, they were there. Not fully formed, not easy to reach, but there. The wholeness I was grieving the loss of turned out to be the wholeness I’d been ignoring all along.

If you’re in the middle of losing someone, I won’t pretend any of this makes it lighter today. It doesn’t work that way. But I’ll offer one small thing to hold. The ache you feel is not only proof of how much they mattered, though it is that. It’s also a map. It’s showing you, with painful accuracy, the exact places where you’d stopped holding your own life and asked someone else to hold it for you.

You don’t have to do anything with that map yet. You just have to let yourself feel it and trust that it knows where the unfinished work is.

What we look for in another person is almost never absent. It’s just waiting, a little further in than we wanted to go. Grief, for all its cruelty, has a way of walking us there.

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About Santiago Vitagliano

Santiago Vitagliano writes under the pen name SAVI. He is the author of The Journey Begins Within and Awakened Paths | Caminando Despiertos, written in English and Spanish, and a Readers' Choice Finalist at the American Book Fest. His work sits where contemplative faith meets the practical work of healing. He writes at thejourneybeginswithin.com.

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What My Broken Face ID Taught Me About Being More Present

“Every moment, every challenge, every inner reaction is here to show you exactly what you need to let go of in order to be free.” ~Michael A. Singer

The other day, while standing in the kitchen, I grabbed my phone to send a text, but it didn’t recognize my face. Suddenly, every time I wanted to use it, I had to enter my four-digit code. The whole process took no more than two seconds, yet I caught myself sighing with exasperation every time.

My reaction surprised me. Had I become so accustomed to immediacy that even such a tiny delay felt agitating?

The pace of our lives has changed remarkably quickly in just one generation. My mother, born in 1928, grew up in a small town in Hungary where her family’s water came from a well in the center of town. She couldn’t simply turn on the faucet—water for cleaning, cooking, and bathing had to be carried in buckets for over a mile and then heated on a coal-fired stove.

My mother’s phone number was 2, the post office was 1, and live operators had to connect all the calls. The concept of FaceTime would have been viewed as preposterous science fiction.

I was born in Brooklyn in 1963 and grew up having to wait an entire year for the annual TV broadcasts of my favorite movies: The Wizard of Oz and Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. For decades, if I needed to make a call when I was away from home, I had to wait my turn at a public telephone booth, coins in hand.

When my children were young, we waited in lines to drop off rolls of film for developing and then waited days to see the photos. We stood in line at banks, video stores, and record stores. When we were headed somewhere we’d never been before, we had to stop at gas stations to ask for directions and buy paper maps that were almost impossible to refold.

Yet now, having to enter a passcode to open a phone that provides me with instant access to an entire world of information, entertainment, and connectivity in the palm of my hand had become a source of frustration.

This episode with my broken Face ID brought into vivid focus one of the downsides of modern technology. Speed is seductive because every shortcut—one-click shopping, AI search results, text messaging, instant payment apps—quietly trains us to expect immediacy. We adapt so quickly that yesterday’s miracles become today’s expectations, and even two extra seconds can feel unacceptable.

Patience—our ability to remain calm when life doesn’t move as quickly as we want it to or in the way we’d ideally like—grows with repetition. But waiting is only good practice when we’re willing to stay present with feelings of frustration and discomfort instead of automatically reaching for a distraction.

Learning to relax with life’s little frustrations helps us get better at coping with the bigger ones, but many conveniences remove a tiny bit of the friction that helps us build this particular emotional muscle, making it all the more important to exercise it intentionally.

When we practice letting go of needing things to go our way, we increase our distress tolerance.

Low distress tolerance has been linked with anxiety, depression, substance use, eating disorders, and other forms of psychological suffering. Increasing our distress tolerance—expanding our capacity to experience uncomfortable thoughts, feelings, urges, or physical sensations without immediately trying to escape them—is strongly associated with better mental health.

Not long ago, daily life was filled with plenty of time to let your mind wander, like long walks to and from the public village well. While we’ve adapted remarkably quickly to modern technology, our minds and nervous systems still need regular opportunities when we’re not inundated with new information so we can slow down, reflect, and process our experiences.

Exploring my Face ID aggravation more deeply, I realized how much impatience relates to presence—the willingness and ability to fully embrace life in the here and now.

When we’re impatient, we’re essentially rejecting the present moment. We want it to be over or for something else to be happening. It’s the urge to race ahead into a different moment instead of slowing down and relaxing into reality as it is.

As an experiment, I decided not to immediately try to fix my Face ID function. Instead of viewing this inconvenience as a problem to eliminate, I chose to use it as an opportunity to illuminate deeper truths about myself and my relationship with my phone.

I saw how rarely I resist my phone’s powerful pull and how constant, lightning-fast connectivity reinforces the overly hurried pace at which I move through life. It also keeps me living too much in my head rather than fully inhabiting my body.

The tiny pause of entering my code gave me just enough space to practice cultivating the qualities I want to embody—relaxation, groundedness, and ease—instead of blindly entering the world of screens full speed. Every time I saw the touch screen and noticed my annoyance rise, it became an opportunity to take a deep breath or two and intentionally come back to myself and the moment at hand.

The more I stayed with this experiment, the more I noticed similar invitations to take a sacred pause and reclaim my agency.

Impatience arises so often: sitting at a red light, standing in a long line at the grocery store, arguing with an AI chatbot that keeps misunderstanding my request while I’m trying to speak to a real person. All of these moments are opportunities to resist reaching for my phone or another habitual distraction—to strengthen my capacity to stay present with the reality before me.

Every time I was able to notice tension building when I wanted a moment to end or be different, I tried to relax and observe the agitation instead of trying to eliminate the cause. When I did this, I felt more connected to the wisest, most equanimous part of myself that can remain steady in any situation.

A few days later, after restarting my phone for an entirely different reason, Face ID suddenly started working again. I was surprised to notice that my first reaction was disappointment. What had initially felt like an annoying glitch had become an unexpected gift.

My broken Face ID taught me that every little annoyance carries the potential to wake us up.

Every urge to speed up can become an invitation to slow down, and every small frustration can become an opportunity to practice presence. Every time we choose to accept life as it is instead of fighting it, we strengthen our ability to meet life with more peace and resilience.

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About Myra Goodman

Myra Goodman is the award-winning author of four books and the creator of Quest for Eternal Sunshine—an online platform offering free resources for healing and well-being. In her first career, Myra co-founded Earthbound Farm, where she spent thirty years growing the company from a backyard garden into the world’s largest grower of organic produce. Sign up for her free monthly newsletter and follow her work on Instagram and Facebook.

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What Happened When I Finally Stopped Saying “I’m Fine”

“The wound is the place where the Light enters you.” ~Rumi

The first winter, I learned to lie cheerfully.

“How are you settling in?” someone would ask, and I would smile and say, “Really well, thank you.” That was the most fluent English I spoke all day.

I had left a warm, loud, crowded life and landed in a quiet apartment in a country where the cold did something to the air that made it hurt to breathe. I was a student, far from everyone who knew my name properly. I was supposed to be grateful.

And I was grateful. That was the confusing part.

People back home had pooled hope and money and prayers to get me here. My parents told relatives about me with a particular shine in their voices. How do you turn around and say you cry in the cereal aisle?

Because I did. One evening I stood in a grocery store looking for a vegetable I had eaten my whole life and could not find anywhere, under any name. Something about that small absence undid me, and I cried in front of the frozen peas like the floor had dropped away.

Then I wiped my face, bought something else, and texted my mother a photo of my “big Canadian grocery haul” with three smiley faces.

This became the shape of my days. Struggle in private, perform in public, and report home like a contented postcard. I told myself this was maturity.

It was not maturity. It was a slow, quiet disappearing.

I had an internal rulebook I never questioned. Others have had it so much harder. People would do anything to be where you are. You chose this, so you have no right to complain.

Every rule was technically true. Together, they built a small prison where my feelings were not allowed to exist, because someone, somewhere, was always suffering more.

So I kept the loneliness folded up small. I answered “I’m fine” so many times that I almost believed the words could replace the truth. They could not. The ache just went looking for other exits.

It came out as headaches and a tiredness sleep did not touch. It came out as snapping at the few people close enough to snap at, then hating myself for it. It came out as lying awake at 3 a.m., scrolling through photos of a home that was carrying on perfectly well without me.

What finally cracked me open was not dramatic. It rarely is.

A classmate I barely knew asked, “How are you, really?” and then did the thing almost nobody does. She paused. She waited through my automatic “I’m good,” and she did not fill the silence.

And for some reason, in that gap, the truth fell out of me. “Actually,” I said, “I think I’ve been really lonely. I don’t think I’m okay.”

I braced for her to look uncomfortable or to hand me a bright, useless “You’ll be fine!” Instead, her face softened, and she said, “Yeah. Me too. It’s so much harder than people admit.”

That was it. No solution, no rescue. Just one person saying, “Me too” and the prison wall turning out to be paper.

I wish I could tell you everything changed that night. It didn’t. But something small and stubborn shifted, and I started practicing a terrifying new sentence: “I’m having a hard time.”

I said it to a cousin, who admitted she had cried through her own first year abroad and never told a soul. I said it to a neighbor, who started leaving small things at my door. I said it, eventually, to a professional and learned that needing support is not the same as being broken.

Each time, the same quiet miracle. The thing I was so ashamed of turned out to be the most ordinary, human thing in the world. I had been so busy hiding my struggle that I never gave anyone the chance to meet me in it.

Here is what those years taught me and what I would gently offer you if you are pretending too.

Gratitude and grief can share the same room. You can be thankful for an opportunity and still mourn what it cost you. One feeling does not cancel the other, and you do not have to earn the right to hurt.

“Someone has it worse” is not a reason to stay silent. There will always be someone who has it worse, and there will always be someone who has it better. Neither of them is living your life. Your pain does not need a permission slip to be real.

And being seen is not the same as being weak. For years I thought strength meant needing nothing from anyone. Now I think strength is letting one trusted person see the unedited version, even when your voice shakes.

If you take one thing from this, let it be small and doable. The next time someone asks how you are, try telling exactly one safe person a slightly truer answer than “fine.”

You don’t have to explain everything. You don’t have to fall apart. You can simply say, “It’s been harder than I let on,” and see what happens in the silence afterward.

I cannot promise it will fix the cold or the distance or the strange grief of whatever you’re mourning. But I can promise this: you were never meant to carry it alone, and you were never as alone as the pretending made you feel.

The crack you’re so ashamed of might be exactly where the light gets in.

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About Hareesma Amutha Venkatesan

Hareesma Amutha Venkatesan moved from India to Canada on her own and learned, slowly, that asking for help is its own kind of courage. She now helps others navigate identity, belonging, and life transitions with warmth and zero judgment. Take her free 2-minute quiz, Is It Anxiety or Burnout?, and find more gentle resources at Hap Therapy Care.

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Why Self-Care Matters Most When You Have No Time

“Taking care of yourself doesn’t mean me first; it means me too.” ~L.R. Knost

We live in a society that celebrates pushing through; burnout is often worn as a badge of honor, and many job descriptions state bluntly, “Must be able to perform well under pressure and thrive in a fast-paced environment.”

I’m very well aware that self-care isn’t a luxury; it’s essential. “You can’t pour from an empty cup” and “You must put on your own oxygen mask first before assisting others” are two of the most well-known quotes. And while they might sound like a cliché, they are definitely true.

I’ve shared these quotes on numerous occasions, although perhaps with slightly different words, because they’ve become so familiar and overused that many people just roll their eyes when they hear them again.

As a holistic practitioner, I take self-care pretty seriously, as I am very well aware of the consequences when we neglect ourselves and our needs.

Maybe it’s also a sign of getting older—I’m in my late fifties. When I was much younger and in busy jobs I never acknowledged that I was stressed or could do with slowing down. At that time, I felt that I was having fun, although the consequences were obvious: back pain and toothache due to grinding.

Admittedly, as a woman without children, it’s very easy for me to fit self-care into my schedule, as I can organize my day, my work, and my leisure activities the way I want to. I have no caring responsibilities, like many in the “sandwich generation,” caring for children and aging parents, and my mum, although in her eighties, is thankfully fit and independent.

Well, that changed quite suddenly one day last year when my mum had a fall and needed surgery. My mum lives miles away, so initially we were only in touch by phone, and thankfully my sister happened to be with Mum at the time. But my sister’s time was limited, as her family—she’s married with two young kids—was waiting for her back home.

I promised my mum I’d be there when she left the hospital so I could support her in the first weeks at home and make the transition a wee bit easier for her. As I can work location-independently, that really was a no-brainer for me and the least I could do.

My flights were booked and my holiday canceled, and I was planning to spend eight weeks with her. Thankfully, Mum and I have quite a good relationship, we’ve always had, but I was slightly apprehensive about spending so much time together, living with her twenty-four-seven.

The last time I did that, I was attending a course over two months and chose to stay with her because it was logistically just easier. For several reasons we had a rather challenging time. Mum has her routines, I’ve got mine, and while she’s quite tolerant and I tried to be flexible, we’ve encountered some major clashes. Also—and that might be my ‘excuse’—because I was slightly stressed by my studies, as I was preparing for an exam. Hence, this time I wanted to approach things differently.

The first couple of days after my arrival, Mum was still in the hospital, and it was just joyful to see her and hear that her recovery had already progressed quite well. It was also very rewarding to see her so grateful that she wasn’t on her own.

When Mum left the hospital, thankfully she didn’t need full-time care, but there were doctors’ appointments, physiotherapy visits, phone calls to insurance companies, paperwork, home adaptations to organize, and hundreds of small jobs that somehow merged into one enormous task.

At the same time, I was still running my own business and seeing clients online from her spare bedroom. Every evening I would look at my own to-do list and realize that I hadn’t tackled much at all. The strange thing wasn’t that I was exhausted; it was that I had accepted this as normal, and I’m sure that’s the daily reality for many carers.

Like so many of us, I automatically adopted the belief that there was no room left to care for myself. It is an easy trap to fall into when faced with the harsh reality rather than an ideal-world theory.

I felt stuck in survival mode, just functioning and spinning plates to keep everything moving. From coordinating and organizing everything for Mum to seeing clients and running my practice as usual, it seemed I was on a hamster wheel with no time at all for myself—or so I thought.

But I realized something had to change, as I wanted my stay and our time together to be supportive, positive, and harmonious. This time I took my own advice much more seriously. 

While I couldn’t continue all my usual sports activities—at home I cycle and play tennis at least twice a week, which makes a massive difference for my physical and mental health—I could still find a few minutes each day for what I call my stress hygiene. Just a few minutes. That’s the advantage of my favorite self-care practice: TRE (Tension Releasing Exercises) requires very little time and can be done almost anywhere.

In TRE, we invite the body to do what it is naturally designed to do after stress: literally shake off tension it’s been holding onto. As your muscles relax, your nervous system gradually settles too, guiding you toward a state of deep relaxation and restorative calm.

I believe that’s one of the most important things each of us needs to find: a way to release stress, not just manage it. To me, managing stress often feels like reorganizing or pushing it aside. What we really want is a modality that helps us let it go, whatever that practice may be for you.

It really has to work for you in reality, because otherwise, what’s the point of just liking the idea of it? Many people say, “I know, I need to meditate, but I can’t sit still,” and they force themselves to do so. I have seen far too many people struggle, simply because their heart wasn’t in it and possibly, they didn’t believe in it, either.

But when you find the stress hygiene technique that works for you, it will be joyful to practice, you will feel the desire to do it, and you will notice the difference it can make for you, your life, and the people around you. I also believe you just know. There’s this inner feeling, your gut instinct. Most importantly, ask yourself: Does practicing it bring you joy and a sense of relaxation?

Admittedly, there are many approaches you might need to try before finding ‘the one’—perhaps a bit like kissing a few frogs before finding your prince or princess.

And here are a few suggestions. Some are more mind-based, like:

• Meditation, whether that’s guided or not
• Visualizations
• Grounding
• Writing, journaling, poetry

Others are more body-based, like:

• Something as simple as walking barefoot on the ground
• Breathing exercises
• Movement: running, walking, dancing, boxing …
• More time in nature, ideally without your phone or headphones plugged in
• Yoga, Tai Chi, TRE

Maybe you want to consider looking into gadgets like vagus nerve stimulators. They might work for you; they might end up gathering dust once the novelty has worn off, but I want to include them, nevertheless.

So, back to my own experience, I practiced whenever I could: Sometimes when I was with my mum in the garden, sometimes when talking to her, and often in bed, just before falling asleep or in the first few minutes after waking up.

Because nothing had changed and life continued to be busy, I didn’t initially recognize how much the practice was helping. But I felt more like myself again, calmer and in control of the situation. And I slept better. And often it’s the people in our immediate environment that spot the difference first.

It was my mum’s partner who told her that I seemed much kinder, and rather than reacting to his comments—we have our moments—I was listening more patiently and responded without being irritated about the little things that could have easily sparked tension.

So, here’s what I’ve learned and want to share with you in the hope you’ll find it helpful, regardless of your being a (sandwich) carer or a busy professional in a highly stressful job:

• Even if those slightly overused sayings about empty cups and oxygen masks sound clichéd, they are most certainly true.
• Keep exploring different stress release techniques until you find one that genuinely works for you. Believe me, it’ll be worthwhile.
• Just a few minutes can make a huge difference.
• If you don’t notice a difference yourself, ask the people around you. They might notice it first.

I know we are expected to keep functioning under all kinds of circumstances, often carrying invisible and emotional weights and worries, but that doesn’t have to be the gold standard. Maybe you are motivated to break this vicious cycle by prioritizing your health and well-being. This means becoming more balanced, regulating your nervous system, being kinder to yourself and others, and ultimately preventing burnout.

Burnout is real, especially for carers or busy mums and dads, whether caring is their paid profession or they do it for love. Please always remember that you deserve the same love and care you so freely give to others.

A few minutes spent caring for yourself isn’t an escape from caring for others. It’s part of caring. Not only for yourself, but for the people who depend on you, too.

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About Sylvia Tillmann

Sylvia knows that our bodies hold more wisdom than we often realize.  As a holistic practitioner and TRE (Tension Releasing Exercises) Provider, she guides people to access that wisdom, helping them release tension and more. Download her Five Suggestions to get started here and visit her at tremendousTRE.co.uk.

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Same Café, New Me: How I Found Freedom Without Changing My Life

“Trauma creates change you don’t choose. Healing is about creating change you do choose.” ~Michelle Rosenthal”

Today I am sitting in my favorite café in Venice Mall. I got my favorite seat, the one near the water.

I have spent countless hours here. I have cried here. Journaled here. Drawn here. Consoled myself here.

There was a time when this café felt like my only refuge from a life that felt too heavy to carry.

Today I am sitting in the same seat, drinking the same tea, looking at the same water. And for the first time, I realized something. I feel good.

Not numb. Not performing okayness while something heavier runs underneath. Actually, genuinely, quietly good.

Everything outside is almost exactly the same. But I am not.

A Few Months Ago, I Would Come Here To Escape

When I used to come here before, I wasn’t really coming for the tea. I was coming to breathe.

Going out was never simple. There were always questions from parents waiting for me.

Where are you going? Why? Who are you meeting? When will you return?

And underneath each question was something heavier—the implication that I needed to justify myself. That my choices required approval. That I should feel guilty for wanting to simply exist outside those four walls.

The exhausting part wasn’t the questions.

The exhausting part was believing I needed permission to live my own life.

The Home I Grew Up In

For most of my childhood, I believed I had good parents and a good upbringing.

I had to believe that. It was the only way to survive.

What I didn’t understand then was that I had learned to dissociate from the pain. To convince myself that the difficult moments were exceptions, not patterns. Children do this when the alternative is too frightening to hold.

My mother became an orphan as a toddler, raised by a cruel aunt who treated her like a maid. She repeated that behavior with me—not because she chose to consciously, but because unhealed wounds pass themselves on.

She mocked my clothes, my choices, and even my confidence. The same qualities she criticized at home were often appreciated outside, which left me deeply confused.

She turned my father against me and cast me as the family villain. She was my first bully. I didn’t understand her manipulations then, but my pillow would be wet from my tears every night in my teenage years. How could my own mother be so cruel to me?.

For most of my life I thought of myself as a difficult, bad person because that is what had been fed into my mind throughout my childhood. Even when people showed me love and acceptance, I couldn’t receive it. I believed that if they truly knew me, they wouldn’t like me either.

But what confused me most was that she wasn’t always like this. Sometimes she was warm, loving, caring. And so I told myself for years that this was simply a complicated love—the kind many families have.

Then one night, months into my healing journey, I was lying in bed crying after she had hurt me again. And I thought, “She can’t be this evil all the time. She must have loved me sometimes.”

And a childhood memory flashed before my eyes.

I had been sick. Home alone with her. She didn’t come to check my fever. Didn’t sit with me. Didn’t ask how I was. She quietly went about her own work, unbothered.

But the moment my father walked through the door, she transformed. Warm. Attentive. The picture of the most loving, caring mother.

And in those few seconds, the puzzle of my life finally unravelled.

I never had a mother. She was just acting like one when others were watching.

Everything became clear. The bullying, the mocking, the threats—all of it had happened when I was alone with her. The loving, caring, kind mother appeared only in the presence of others. That is why my childhood and adult self was always so confused. Sometimes I was showered with love; sometimes I was crushed by her cruelty.

I was her emotional punching bag.

It took me four nights of crying to process and accept this. But since that acceptance, something shifted. Her criticisms stopped landing the same way. The hold she had over me began to loosen—not because she changed, but because I finally understood what I had been responding to.

I detached from her emotionally. I accepted that I never had a mother and never will. This acceptance alone freed me from the years of hurting and trying to earn her love. I started mothering my own inner child instead—giving her all the love I had yearned for my mother to give me. And she started healing.

My father’s story was different but left its own marks.

He came from a genuinely humble background—a brilliant student who had to start working at fourteen, studying further through distance education despite being a topper. He struggled enormously and built a respectable life from almost nothing. But he was so terrified of lack that he installed that same terror in me.

He feared my love of art and creativity. If he caught me drawing, he behaved as if I had committed a crime. He gave me material comforts but used them as weapons of shame—reminding me constantly how hard he had worked, how lucky I was, how much I owed him simply for existing in the family he had built.

Art will not get you anywhere. Earning is hard. You need to study. You need to be practical.

He never directly stopped me from doing anything. But if I chose something he didn’t approve of—going out, dressing as I liked, taking my own decisions—the guilt-tripping was relentless. Quiet, persistent, exhausting. He feared for my future, my career, and tried to make every small decision for me.

He did love me. But he never realized how much fear, shame, and self-doubt he had installed in the process.

And that child received a very clear message: she was incapable. Unworthy. Undeserving.

The Beliefs I Carried Without Knowing

I wasn’t born believing I was incapable.

I wasn’t born feeling guilty for having needs.

I wasn’t born believing I needed permission to live my own life.

I wasn’t born feeling unworthy of love.

These beliefs were installed. They felt like facts because I received them before I had the language to question them.

I could see it clearly when I looked back at my career. I had been a star student in college yet got placed last with the lowest salary package. The belief that I was incapable, that creativity had no value, that I could not make it on my own—it showed up in every room I walked into. Not in what I said. In how I held myself. In what I believed I deserved.

That was not who I was. That was what I had been taught to believe about myself.

What Began to Change

Healing began with reading. With slowly recognizing patterns. With understanding that what I had experienced as a child had a name—and that name was not my fault.

I started talking to the child I had been. The quiet, invisible little girl who had learned to make herself small to stay safe. I told her—every night, patiently, repeatedly—that it was not her fault. That she was worthy. That she was loved.

She didn’t believe it immediately.

But I kept going.

When nothing in my life was working and I was tired of the cycle of shame and guilt, I collapsed inward. That collapse became the beginning. I started understanding my patterns. Slowly, I started standing up for myself—to my parents, to the old voices inside my own head.

They didn’t like it.

But I wasn’t their prisoner anymore.

And the strangest thing began to happen.

As I changed the relationship I had with myself, the hold my parents had on me began to loosen. I cook my own food now. I go out when I want. My father’s questions no longer send me into guilt and justification. My mother’s behavior—the same behavior—I can now observe without being swept away by it.

I have detached emotionally while living in the same house. I still do what needs to be done. But their behavior no longer defines how I feel about myself. I have started knowing my worth.

And I have never been more at peace with myself.

I No Longer Abandon Myself

This might be the biggest change of all. I am aware of my feelings now.

When I feel anxious, angry, or hurt, I listen.

Earlier I would override myself. Suppress myself. Ignore what my body was trying to tell me because I had learned that my feelings were an inconvenience.

Now I ask: What is this feeling trying to tell me?

Sometimes it is an old wound. Sometimes it is a boundary being crossed. Sometimes it is simply my body asking for rest.

When an old pattern surfaces—a familiar dynamic trying to pull me back into a smaller version of myself—I notice it. I name it. I remind myself that I am safe, that I have choices, that I am no longer someone who has to absorb what others cannot hold.

And I come back to myself.

The Freedom I Was Looking For

For years I thought freedom meant leaving. Leaving the house. Leaving the situation. Leaving the people who hurt me. Maybe one day I will.

But sitting in this café today, I realized something.

Freedom arrived before I physically went anywhere.

Freedom arrived when I stopped believing the things that kept me trapped.

Freedom arrived when I stopped seeking permission.

Freedom arrived when I stopped abandoning myself.

Freedom arrived when I started giving myself the love I had been waiting for others to give me.

The people around me may still try to guilt-trip me. They may still criticize me. They may still be uncomfortable with who I am becoming.

But their reactions are no longer my prison.

The Wildflower Was Always There

Healing didn’t turn me into someone new. It revealed who I was underneath the fear. Underneath the guilt. Underneath the shame. Underneath the conditioning.

The wildflower was always there. She was simply buried beneath years of absorbed beliefs that were never hers to carry.

And now she is blooming. On her own terms. In her own colors. In her own time.

Today I am sitting in the same café.

The same seat. The same tea. The same water.

A few months ago I sat here trying to escape my life.

Today I sit here grateful for it. Not because everything is perfect. But because I finally feel at home within myself.

And after everything I have been through, that feels like everything.

If you are healing from childhood wounds, difficult family dynamics, or years of self-doubt, I hope this reminds you that sometimes the biggest transformation happens while everything outside appears exactly the same.

Other times, changing the outside environment can be the first step toward healing and taking control of your life. Only you can decide what is safest for you.

Either way, keep going. One day you will look back and realize how far you have come.

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About Sangeeta Kumari

Sangeeta writes about healing from childhood trauma, self-worth, emotional resilience, and the journey of becoming yourself after years of people-pleasing and self-doubt. Through personal stories and reflections, she explores nervous system healing, boundaries, solitude, creativity, and finding freedom from unhealthy family dynamics. She shares her writing on Substack at substack.com/@unveilthewildflower and on Instagram, where she documents her ongoing journey back to herself.

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When Your Imagination Turns Every Problem into a Crisis

“You can’t depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.” ~Mark Twain

It started with a clogged kitchen drain. Or maybe the drain was where everything else I’d been carrying finally surfaced.

Regardless, the water wasn’t moving. It was so bad that some of it backed up in the bathroom sink. Baking soda and vinegar didn’t help. Neither did copious pots of boiling water.

I felt my jaw clench, shoulders stiffen, and breath shorten. My brain, seeing a break in my supposedly impenetrable shield, saw this as a perfect opportunity to create a disaster movie screenplay on the spot. It was titled Scenario Z.

It practically wrote itself.

“I can’t afford the tools to unclog the sink.”

“The landlord isn’t answering his texts.”

“I can’t pay for a plumber right now.”

“I’ll have to wash the dishes in the bathtub for weeks.”

Of course, none of this happened.

It Wasn’t About the Sink

This little movie wasn’t about the sink at all. It was a reaction to several events occurring at once.

One week after moving into an apartment, my project contract ended unexpectedly. Then, two of my adult children came to stay with me, adding weight to my already heavy shoulders. As my bank account dwindled, my job applications drew nothing but crickets, and the faith I’d carefully woven for myself started to fray.

One unexpected expense felt like it could topple the fragile balance I’d managed to build. It’s why Scenario Z was quickly greenlit for release. My brain decided to create a montage of suffering before I had a moment to breathe and focus on the problem.

Interrupting the Process

I briefly fell in step with my brain’s story. My head buzzing, I snapped at one of my kids. It was then that I decided I had enough. I apologized to my child, left the sinks to do what they wanted, and went to bed.

While the apology didn’t unclog the sink, it reminded me of what actually needed the first repair. My son wasn’t the problem. My fear had simply found the nearest person.

Owning the mistake didn’t solve the plumbing issue, but it kept a plumbing problem from becoming a damaged relationship.

When I woke up, after my brain replayed the feature presentation of forthcoming disasters, I took action and looked at the situation from a wider angle.

First, I checked the bathroom sink to see if there was a problem. From there, I timed how long it took the kitchen sink to fill up and drain. Once I knew that, I tried a few online suggestions.

Eventually, I pieced together a temporary solution. There was still a blockage, but the sink drained better.

I had narrowed the problem from catastrophic to annoying. In turn, I stopped it from affecting the people around me.

Meanwhile, my brain shoved Scenario Z inside its filing cabinet, overflowing with older disaster screenplays, ready to pull it out again at a moment’s notice.

My problem didn’t change overnight—my relationship to it had.

Why My Brain Did Its Thing

For me, understanding why I went down the dark path came from how I illustrated the problem.

It wasn’t: “Let me look for ways to figure this out.”

It was: “How am I going to pay for this?”

Scarcity thinking resurfaced, even though I thought I had a handle on it. Turns out, I may never get rid of this. However, now I know some tricks to keep things quiet.

I Stepped Away 

Staring at the sink, your empty manuscript page, or your tiny bank balance doesn’t magically change things. On the other hand, stepping away from the scenario can give you time to consider a new angle. It’s how I figured out the next steps to clear the drain.

I Slept

Sleep gave my racing thoughts enough time to settle. By morning, things felt calmer. The problem looked the same, but I didn’t. Rest gave me enough distance to see solutions I couldn’t find the night before.

I Let My Brain Vent

No matter how hard you try, there are some moments when your brain needs to get things off its chest. Usually, this happens first thing in the morning when your body releases stress hormones to start your day. Unfortunately, these hormones also start your brain’s engines while it switches from unconsciousness to alertness.

I let mine babble without believing every word it said. Most of what I heard wasn’t reality. It resurfaced as yesterday’s unresolved frustration, asking for one more audience.

I Reframed the Problem

Don’t try the same things that didn’t work before. Take a look at the situation from another angle.

For instance, instead of gritting your teeth and screaming, “It’s not working,” rephrase the statement. Perhaps, “What exactly isn’t working?” Or, “Let me run through the steps again to see if I missed something.”

It may not give you the right solution, but it could open another path toward resolution.

I’ve realized I’ll probably keep writing Scenario Z from time to time. Stress still hands my imagination a pen. However, I know I don’t have to produce the whole movie.

Growth isn’t pretending you’ll never panic again. It’s recognizing you need to rewrite your acting contract before you step into the opening dramatic scene of Scenario Z.

It’s pausing long enough to determine the actual problem instead of assuming what it might become.

Yes, sometimes the answer is still difficult. Sometimes the worst case really does happen.

We repeatedly rehearse conversations that never happen, pay debts that never form, and mourn outcomes that never come to pass.

Scenario Z convinces us we’re preparing for reality. What we’re actually doing is quickly exhausting ourselves before reality can arrive.

Today, my catastrophic imagination is a much easier place to leave than I once believed.

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About Richard Keller

Richard Keller is an author, humorist, and neurodivergent. He shares his insights about bipolar disorder, anxiety, and how to live a fulfilling life with mental illness to those with similar conditions. You can find his memoir on late-diagnosed bipolar disorder, Faith and Slipper Socks, on Amazon and at bookstores. More information on his works at the Laugh & Repair website.

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The Pressure to Excel: When Success Feels Like Survival

“To tie your worth to achievements is a recipe for suffering.” ~Brad Bizjack

Children don’t just learn mathematics, science, and languages in school. They also learn what success feels like, what failure means, who they believe they are, and sometimes, whether they think they belong.

When I was in primary school, my school introduced academic streaming. If there were four grade seven classes, the highest-performing students were placed in the first stream, followed by the second, third, and fourth streams based on academic performance.

On paper, it made perfect sense. Students would learn alongside peers of similar academic ability, and teachers could tailor their instruction accordingly.

There was just one catch: your place was never guaranteed. At the end of every examination period, the rankings were reviewed, and students were moved accordingly.

You could find yourself promoted to the top stream or demoted to another class depending on your performance. It didn’t matter where you had been the previous term. Every exam was a fresh judgment. The entire school knew who was in which class. If someone moved up, everyone knew. If someone dropped, everyone knew that too.

When the system was introduced, I found myself in the top stream.

Looking back, I suspect I was probably where I belonged at that particular moment. But if I’m being completely honest, I also know I spent most of my time barely holding on. Had I been placed in the second stream, I probably would have thrived better there academically. Instead, I lived with the constant fear of slipping.

To my young mind, dropping to the second stream wasn’t simply changing classrooms. It would have been public failure. I worried about disappointing my parents. I worried about what my teachers would think. More than anything, I dreaded the whispers from other students. The shame felt unimaginable, so every exam became less about learning and more about survival.

That survival shaped everything. The goal was no longer to understand the material but to pass the exam and keep your seat. If you walked into our classroom during break time, you would find most of us bent over our desks finishing assignments. Taking work home meant sacrificing precious hours that could be spent studying ahead for the next test.

The expectations extended beyond the classroom, too. There was an unspoken understanding among the teachers: you were the bright students. You should be able to teach yourself, read ahead, and grasp concepts with minimal explanation. Excellence wasn’t simply expected; it was assumed.

Even then, there was something about the second stream that fascinated me. There were students there who were clearly capable of joining the top class, yet somehow, they never quite did.

At the time, I couldn’t understand it. Why wouldn’t you want to be in the “best” class? Secretly, though, I envied them. They laughed more. They seemed less burdened by the constant pressure to prove themselves.

Looking back, it almost felt as though they had an unspoken agreement among themselves: don’t drop to the third stream, but don’t move to the top stream either. And if someone from the top class slipped, don’t make room for them to bring all that unnecessary pressure with them. Whether that pact truly existed or not hardly matters now. As a child, that’s how it felt.

As an adult, I wonder whether they understood something I didn’t. Perhaps they instinctively recognized that every achievement comes with a maintenance cost.

In the second stream, they could consistently excel. They had room to breathe. They could enjoy learning without carrying the constant fear of losing a title they had worked so hard to earn. Meanwhile, those of us in the top stream lived under a different kind of pressure. From the perspective of the rest of the school, we were the students everyone admired. Inside our classroom, however, many of us were simply trying not to become the weakest student in the strongest group.

What made the experience even stranger was that there were really two rankings. To the rest of the school, I belonged to the top class. Inside that classroom, I was often near the bottom. You could be ranked thirty-third out of one hundred and fifty students in the entire grade, which by any reasonable measure was an excellent result, yet still find yourself thirty-third out of forty-five students in the top stream.

Technically, you were among the highest-performing students in the school. Emotionally, you felt like you were failing. Teachers looked at your report and insisted, “You can do better.” My parents expected more because I was in the top class. No one seemed to notice that I was already competing against the strongest students in the school.

It was my first experience of discovering that you can occupy one of the highest places in a system while feeling as though you’re at the very bottom of it. Looking back, I sometimes wonder if I’ve been carrying that lesson ever since.

The other two streams occupied very different places in my mind. The third stream was almost invisible to me, and I suspect it was to many of my classmates as well. It simply wasn’t part of my mental map. I never imagined dropping that far, so I rarely thought about it. The fourth stream, however, stayed with me for entirely different reasons.

Before academic streaming, we had all been classmates. Some had been my desk mates. Some had been my friends. We had learned together without attaching so much meaning to where each of us stood academically. Looking back now, I often wonder what it felt like for the children who suddenly found themselves labeled as the weakest in the school. I never thought to ask then. I wish I had.

Part of the reason I noticed that class at all was because we were occasionally expected to help them. You would be paired with another student to explain a concept or work through an exercise together.

Those moments stayed with me because their classroom felt so different from ours. There were fewer students, which meant each child received more attention from the teacher. The room seemed brighter, more colorful, and, somehow, more patient.

Lessons moved at a pace that allowed questions to be asked without embarrassment. From where I stood, it felt as though those students had permission to say, “I don’t understand,” or “Can you explain that again?”

In the top stream, those words felt almost unthinkable. We were the bright students. We were expected to understand, to keep up, and to figure things out on our own.

Looking back, I sometimes wonder whether the greatest privilege in that school wasn’t being considered the smartest. It was feeling safe enough to admit when you weren’t.

People often ask how to get to the top. Far fewer ask what it costs to stay there. Every promotion creates higher expectations. Every successful business brings new responsibilities. Every public achievement invites comparison.

Success isn’t simply something you attain; it often becomes something you have to maintain.

Looking back, I sometimes wonder whether this is why positions of power, influence, or being “the best” have never particularly appealed to me. For years, I interpreted that as a lack of ambition. Now I’m not so sure.

Perhaps somewhere around the age of eleven, I began associating standing at the top with the fear of falling. I don’t know if that classroom is where that story began, but I can see how it may have shaped the way I move through the world today.

That reflection has also changed the way I think about achievement itself. As children, we assumed everyone was sitting for the same exam under the same conditions. We didn’t see the classmate who had a tutor waiting at home, the one who lived ten minutes from school while another spent hours traveling, or the child with educated parents who could help with homework every evening.

We didn’t notice who had a quiet room to study in, who had younger siblings to care for, or who arrived at school carrying burdens invisible to the rest of us. We thought the rankings measured intelligence. Looking back, I think they measured much more than that.

There was another cost I didn’t recognize until years later. Friendships rarely had the chance to grow because competition occupied so much space between us. Every exam had the potential to change where you sat, and every mark someone else gained felt as though it could become one you lost.

Without meaning to, many of us learned to see classmates as rivals before we ever had the chance to know them as friends. I sometimes wonder how many relationships were quietly sacrificed at the altar of achievement and whether any report card could ever have been worth that.

Years later, I met one of my former classmates in culinary school. He had been one of the brightest students in our class. Long before academic streaming, I remember him as the boy who could draw beautifully.

He came from what, in our young minds, looked like privilege. His parents picked him up from school in a car while most of us squeezed into public buses. He bought lunch at school while many of us carried ours from home. By every measure we understood as children, he seemed destined for a different future.

I was in culinary school because I had deferred my university admission, and my parents encouraged me to spend the year doing something I genuinely enjoyed. I loved every minute of it. Culinary school never felt like settling. It felt like an unexpected gift.

His circumstances, however, were different. We never spoke about them, and I never asked. We exchanged pleasantries, then carried on with our day. I remember noticing that he smoked and drank, but I have no idea what those things meant in the context of his life. The older I’ve become, the more careful I’ve tried to be about confusing observation with understanding.

For years, I told myself I had sensed shame in him. Now I’m not so sure. Perhaps what I was really seeing was my own confusion. How could someone I had assumed would become a doctor, engineer, or architect end up in the same culinary classroom as me?

More importantly, why did that surprise me at all? Who had taught me that brilliant children follow straight lines or that certain paths are somehow worth more than others? Perhaps that was another lesson hidden within those school years: we weren’t only being taught how to achieve. We were also being taught what success was supposed to look like.

The truth is, I don’t know what became of him. I don’t know whether culinary school was his first choice, his second chance, or simply the road that made sense at the time. I don’t know whether he felt proud to be there, disappointed, or perfectly content. What I do know is that seeing him forced me to question the stories I had carried with me since childhood—stories about talent, potential, and the kinds of lives people were expected to live.

Looking back now, I don’t think this essay is really about academic streaming. It is about the quiet ways childhood shapes us. We leave school believing we have learned mathematics, English, and science, but we also carry away ideas about success, failure, belonging, and what kind of person we are allowed to become. Some of those lessons serve us. Others deserve to be questioned.

I don’t know whether that classroom is the reason I have never chased titles, influence, or the highest seat at the table. Human beings are rarely shaped by a single experience. But I do know that when I look back, I can see one of the places where my relationship with achievement began to take form.

Understanding that hasn’t made me less ambitious. It has made me more intentional. I’ve stopped measuring my life against definitions of success that leave me anxious and started building one that allows me to breathe.

Perhaps that is one of the gifts of revisiting our childhood—not to blame it for the adults we’ve become, but to understand them a little better.

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About Muthoni Amran

Muthoni Amran believes that ordinary experiences often contain extraordinary lessons. Through KenyaonaShoestring.co.ke, she explores the quiet assumptions that shape our lives and invites readers to look at familiar things a little differently.

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