for years, I was performing a version of myself I didn't recognize.
life didn't feel easy growing up. my path felt scattered and directionless, filled with self-doubt, low confidence, abandonment, and a deep sense of not being enough. and instead of learning how to feel any of that, I learned something else: how to excel my way out of it.
since my teens, I believed that the only way to survive was to be the best. to achieve my way into worthiness. it worked on the outside, and it cost me everything on the inside. by the time I reached college, I was mentally, physically, and emotionally burnt out before I'd even really begun.
without understanding it at the time, I made the unconscious choice to shut myself off. from others, from intimacy, from anything that might shine a light on what I was actually carrying. I was surrounded by people and isolated at the same time.
I stayed away from the people who knew me. I projected my pain onto the ones who stayed. I held onto things far too long, because letting go felt like it might undo me entirely.
