It was never mine

It Was Never Mine
What used to ache most was watching other people live inside a choreography I didn’t know the steps to.
Mothers and children laughing in grocery store aisles. Arms looped easily around shoulders. The casual intimacy of people who expected to be loved. I noticed it everywhere—standing in line, passing storefront windows, scrolling past photos I didn’t linger on long enough to admit envy.
For a long time, I asked myself the same question on repeat: Why me? Why did my own mother meet me with such anger? Why did love feel like something I had missed a class on, something everyone else understood without effort?
Eventually, I reached the only conclusion that made the world make sense: I must have been the problem. I decided I was the poison in the well. That belief settled in quietly and stayed for years. It became the explanation for everything—why things didn’t last, why people pulled away, why peace felt temporary and conditional.
So I became what worked.
I became funny. I learned that laughter could buy me access, a temporary visa into belonging. I wore charm like armor, hiding the loneliness underneath it, searching for safety in the wreckage of other people—friends, lovers, even strangers who felt familiar in their own brokenness.
What I found instead was the same pattern, over and over again. Heartbreak. Confusion. The exhausting spiral of a mind that never learned how to rest. I was always reacting, always bracing, always waiting for the ground to disappear beneath me.
When I became a parent, I told myself it would be different.
But trauma doesn’t disappear just because you want better. It waits. It adapts. And before I understood what was happening, I brought chaos into my own home. That is the ghost I still wrestle with—the realization that I carried the embers of my mother’s rage, bitterness, and hostility, and let them catch fire in the lives of my children.
For a long time, I didn’t know why I was so angry. I didn’t recognize it as inheritance. I didn’t see that I was speaking the only language I had ever been taught.
That recognition was devastating. And it was necessary.
Because once the smoke cleared, something else became visible.
The truth.
It was never mine.
The rage. The shame. The belief that love had to be earned through performance or pain. None of it belonged to me, even though I carried it for years. Even though I passed some of it on before I learned how to stop.
The peace I spent my life hunting for wasn’t waiting in the arms of a partner. It wasn’t hidden in approval from people who scattered at the first sign of difficulty. It wasn’t something anyone else was supposed to give me.
It was buried beneath survival.
Under the constant vigilance. Under the stories I told myself to make sense of harm. Under the belief that endurance was the same thing as strength.
What I found there was quieter than I expected.
A heart that kept trying. Courage I didn’t know I was allowed to claim. A resolve built not from virtue, but from necessity.
Sometimes strength isn’t something you choose because you’re ready. Sometimes it’s the only floor left when the house burns down.
So I choose it now.
I choose to stay.
I choose to heal.
I choose to break the pattern.
I will never quit.