“For many years, many years I was scared of the person I was. And I’m not perfect, they say, but I know I was born to be loved. Hey, hey, hey, would they love me now?” - The Strumbellas
We are all damaged. Every single one of us.
From the toughest to the weakest, the loudest to the quietest. We’ve all been broken, battered, shaken, shattered...pick your verb of choice.
As kids, we were told to adjust the volume on our souls. Be better at school. Be taller. Thinner. Fatter. More respectful. Gentler. Less gentle. More godly, less weird.
We became the porridge searching for Goldilocks...forever tweaking the recipe of who we are so that someone, somewhere, might finally say, “Ah, just right.”
And that’s where it begins. The conditional love story. The “I will be loved if only I were more… or less...something.”
Dr. Gabor Maté calls it trauma. I call it the great forgetting. Because in that pursuit of approval, most of us never grow up into who we truly are.
Imagine a lake. Perfectly still. Across it, a breathtaking scene...trees, clouds, sky...the beautiful self. Now look down at the water. You see the reflection...the revealed self.
We are the scene. But we live as the reflection. The demons we inherit from parents, teachers, friends, society...keep us showing the version that floats on the surface.
And if we keep doing that long enough...we start believing that the reflection is us. We gaslight ourselves. We tell the truth to shut up. We learn that the true self is not good enough to be loved.
Now, to be fair, society isn’t evil. It’s just...efficient. It tells us to change, to polish, to perform...because that’s how we succeed. Materially. Meanwhile, the emotional and spiritual versions of us go completely bankrupt.
We live in a system of optics. What’s visible matters. What’s inside...not so much.
When the lake is calm, the reflection isn’t so bad. But life is windy. And people...they keep throwing pebbles. Each ripple distorts the image. And if the pebbles keep coming, we stop being ourselves altogether.
Now imagine a world where everyone is just their distorted reflection. A room full of mirrors showing mirrors. A world of insecure people giving love only to each other’s masks. No one really knows who they are...they just trade reflections.
Escaping this isn’t easy. It requires surrender, vulnerability, honesty...the kind that burns when it touches your skin.
But our real self...it’s trapped. Locked in the basement of our soul. And to free it, we have to walk into the dark and tell the child hiding there, “It’s okay. You’re safe. The world can love you as you are.”
The problem is...most of us don’t even know the way down anymore. We’ve built too many floors above it. And the child...The child has gone quiet. A silence so loud it keeps us awake at night.
That’s what people call the search for meaning. It’s not mystical. It’s just your soul trying to remember your own name. But the remembering hurts. So we drown it out...with work, with phones, with therapy, with shopping, with noise. Anything to not feel the ache of the child inside clawing at the dark.
Do it long enough, and you stop hearing the cries altogether. You become the reflection. And one day, when the noise dies down...when you’re old, tired, and out of distractions...you’ll realize you’ve been homesick your whole life.
So maybe start the journey home today. Tell yourself you’re good enough...not in the Instagram-quote way, but in the trembling, human way. Unlearn the rules about good and bad. Stop judging the shape of your own soul.
Build a bridge...or a staircase...one brick at a time. Not to escape this life, but to come back to it.
Fall in love not with who you’ve become...but with the child who still waits. Find the courage to let the world see you, unfiltered, un-airbrushed, unreflected.
Because that child...your child...is still there. Alone, but not gone. Waiting for you to say the words they’ve needed to hear all along:
“Won’t you come out and play with me”
“Step by step, we all fall down Like toy soldiers” - Martika