The Contract I Was Living

When I was a little girl, I learned something without anyone ever saying it out loud.

If I wanted any semblance of connection,

I had to leave myself.

I learned how to disconnect from my body.

From the parts of me that felt afraid.

From the signals that told me something wasn’t right.

Because staying connected to myself often meant losing connection with my mom.

And losing connection with her meant isolation…

and even more danger than the danger I experienced with her.

So I made a trade.

Not consciously.

But consistently.

I would leave myself…

to stay connected.

And from about four years old, I learned how to:

Read the room.

Adjust.

Stay steady.

Give what was needed.

From the outside, it looked like strength.

Like maturity.

Like a child who could carry a lot.

But underneath, something else was happening.

I wasn’t just adapting.

I was training my nervous system to override itself.

Before I understood leadership, I understood pressure.

Not conceptually.

Structurally.

I grew up inside environments where connection was intermittent and responsibility was often carried alone.

My father was a builder.

He could construct almost anything with his hands, but he did not know how to build relational safety.

There are only a few moments I can remember where I felt something that resembled connection.

They were brief.

A gesture.

A glance.

A song.

From childhood, I had learned to ignore

the burning in my stomach,

the painful tightening,

the knots.

The quiet no inside of me was easy to silence.

I learned this by watching my mother do the same.

I watched her override her own body to survive.

My mother carried incomprehensible self-hatred.

And in loving her,

I learned to carry it too.

That inheritance did not make me broken.

It made me adapted to seamlessly dismiss stress signals in my body.

For a long time, I thought burnout meant I was weak.

That something had gone wrong.

I believed I had failed to manage my life better.

That I hadn’t been disciplined enough.

That I needed to be stronger. More resilient.

That if I could just push harder, the way I always had, I could save all that was falling apart. 

The new year has a way of arriving with pressure.

With expectations to be ready.
Hopeful.
Magically renewed overnight.

But if last year almost broke you, please know,

Survival is not failure.

It is not proof you didn’t want more badly enough.
It is not evidence you fell behind while others moved forward.

Survival is intelligence.

It is the brilliance of your system.

It is the body reading the terrain and choosing the most life-preserving path it can find in that moment.

It is the nervous system doing its quiet, faithful work to keep you alive when conditions seem uncertain, overwhelming, or unsafe in some way.

Grief has a way of awakening me—sometimes in the middle of the night, sometimes in the middle of my life.

I first met Grief years ago.
It arrived abruptly.

Sharply.

Like the thorns of a rose. A beautiful red rose.

I was not ready.

I had no idea what to do with it.

The environment I was in at that time was not suitable for Grief. This system focused on strength and success and grief was seen as weakness. Part of me was comfortable in this oblivion. This fantasy.

So when Grief showed up I did not want anything to do with it.

I first tried to ignore it. I tried to tell it, “You have the wrong person.”

But it insisted it knew me. So, I did the only thing I could do in that season….I ran.

Growing up, my dad’s wrath was like a volcano. I could not rest when he was near.

The constant danger.

His unpredictable explosions.

The constant, imminent threat of death.

So, a few months ago as I was exploring ways to create closure with my dad, it came to me.

I could go and face the volcano in person.

I needed to physically climb through the dark ashes. To hear and feel the rumble of an ominous mountain I had always been afraid of, but this time, I would have tools.

I wanted to meet my dad on that volcano; a painful need to meet him. To face the man I had been terrified of all of my life.

Maybe through this volcano I could face him.

So I climbed uphill 13,000 feet above sea level to meet him.

It was a prayer.

A plea.

A lament.

A facing toward the terror I had internalized since childhood. This terror had shielded me from the murders my dad had committed when I was a little girl. But my own running from this terror kept me from using my voice.

From taking my place in this world.

And most importantly, it kept the little girl in me ever captive in the terror.

I prayed that if it could happen somehow, I was ready to meet with my dad, face him, and hear what he had to say to me on his deathbed many years ago.

And he did meet me there.

And I wept for him.

I was able to finally mourn him.

And that was good. So good for me.

I will reclaim you from that dark, lonely closet you used to sleep in.

Hold yourself.

Hold your own heart.

Help it trust you can handle its pain.

That it can trust you when it’s broken.

Dear body, I am sorry I have not been at home in you.

The pain scattered all my parts to help me survive.

My heart. My mind. My spirit.

Something happened.

Something happened to what held you and I together.

It’s too late to rescue my sisters, brothers.

And I never had a chance at rescuing my mother.

But today.

I can finally rescue me.

Despair. It can live quietly in the corners of my being. It can go unnoticed for years. Even decades. Until one day it is no longer quiet.

It is loud….

Despair is a painful gnawing within.

An aching emptiness.

A lonely tomb.

It feels like it eats up my bones. My heart. My stomach. It turns my food bitter. My hands cold.

It drains my energy. Turns my strength into ashes. The sunlight into darkness.

It draws out all of my blood leaving me with nothing as I hear over and over again, “What you most desired in this life. Will never. Come to pass.”

One day in a season of deep loss, I finally broke.

I shattered.

My heart. My mind. My spirit.….All in pieces.

It was from this place of absolute decimation, with sharp shards of broken life and broken heart everywhere that I began to very slowly, examine the painful lies I had believed about me, my life, and my future.

I began to pay visits to my past to take a closer look at and study my story. I needed to go back to ground zero where it had all started for me. Here is where I began to uncover from underneath the rubble…

• bloody wounds from my childhood,

• compound fractures from soul-crushing religious systems,

• and tender bruises from the ways I had unknowingly continued generational trauma threads in my own life.

In this exploration, I also unearthed something else underneath the rubble, something completely unexpected…

I began to uncover qualities about myself that had been buried underneath the harmful words and traumatic experiences I had lived through. As I examined and studied my life stories, I started to see not only the buried wounds that needed healing, but also the flowers deep within me that could help me begin to heal.