If you could erase one event from history, what would it be?
So this was it, was this all there was to it? Liars, deceivers, and being the latecomer when the show is already over. Pathetic. Sometimes I look at everything that has happened and wonder what exactly I am supposed to do with it. Who am I now? What am I supposed to become when everything I thought I was meant to be has started to feel so distant, almost like a memory from another lifetime? There were expectations placed on me long before I understood what they meant. Things I was supposed to become. Things I was supposed to know. Ways I was supposed to act. And now, standing here in my twenties, I sometimes feel like I’m still that child trying to understand why everyone else seemed to know where they belonged while I was still searching for somewhere to call home.
Maybe that’s what makes this hurt differently. It isn’t only about what happened recently. It feels connected to something much older. Childhood loneliness has a strange way of following you into adulthood. You learn early how to sit with yourself. You learn how to become useful. You learn how to read the room before anyone asks you how you’re feeling. You learn to understand other people’s reactions because somewhere along the way, understanding them feels safer than trying to explain yourself. And eventually you become so good at carrying things quietly that people forget there is anything heavy inside you at all.
Now my mind feels like a storm, and sometimes I wonder whether I have become useful only to people who don’t have anywhere else to place what they’re carrying. I become the person who listens. The person who understands. The person who stays. The person who can carry someone else’s weight because somehow I’ve convinced myself that this is what love, loyalty, or being a goodperson is supposed to look like. But what happens when there is nothing left for me to carry myself? What happens when the person everyone comes to for understanding doesn’t even understand who he is anymore? Look at what life can do to someone. Pain doesn’t always remain an emotion. Sometimes it takes shape. Sometimes it becomes part of your identity. Sometimes you become so accustomed to surviving that you forget what it feels like simply to exist.
And that’s where I am now, stripped of the certainty I thought I had. Stripped of the version of myself I thought I was supposed to become. Naked, not physically, but inwardly, without the roles, without the expectations, without the usefulness, without the ability to hide behind being the person everyone needs. And perhaps that’s the frightening part. When everything is taken away, what remains? If I am not what I can provide, who am I? If I am not someone’s partner, someone’s worker, someone’s friend, someone’s strong one, then who is standing underneath all of that? Maybe I’ve spent so much of my life becoming what I thought people needed that I never stopped long enough to ask what I needed to become.
So now what? I don’t know.
And for once, I don’t want to pretend that I do. Maybe that’s where this chain has to break, not with some grand revelation, but with the permission to admit that I am still becoming. Maybe I don’t have to know what the next version of me looks like. Maybe I don’t have to immediately turn every wound into wisdom. Maybe some things are allowed to hurt before they teach us anything. Maybe the child who spent years feeling like a latecomer doesn’t need another expectation placed on his shoulders. Maybe he/she needs to finally hear something simple: you don’t have to earn your place here.
Perhaps I cannot erase the day of the deceiver. I cannot erase the loneliness that came before it. I cannot rewrite every disappointment or recover every version of myself that I lost trying to become enough for someone else. But maybe I can stop adding new chains to the old ones. Maybe I can begin separating who I am from what happened to me. Slowly, honestly, without pretending that I’m already healed.
So now what?I suppose I walk, not because I know where I’m going.
But because standing still and calling it my destiny would be another way of letting the past decide who I become.
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