In the last couple of years, I have finally felt safe enough to admit that for the majority of my life, I had no idea what I wanted. Growing up, emotions were unsafe places, and I was made to feel that certain emotions were wrong. I learned instead that being convenient was the key to survival. I shouldn’t have hard feelings, I shouldn’t be uncomfortable, or unhappy, or intense. Instead, I took it upon myself to make sure that the people around me were always pacified, happy, entertained. It somehow became my job to take care of everyone else’s emotions, and to be able to handle that, mine had to take a back seat.

So I grew into a person who had no idea what it was I actually wanted. Instead I became an expert in knowing what made other people happy. The result of this was a passionate, chaotic, anxious adult who constantly felt like an imposter. Jumping from place to place, friend group to friend group, job to job, doing just well enough to look like I fit, but never feeling like I did. Until the day I became a mom.

Having my own family was the catalyst. It wasn’t instant, and for the most part I didn’t even know what I was doing. But slowly, painstakingly, I began to build a life for myself. A life that wasn’t motivated by making other people happy. Brick by brick, along with my husband, we started building a life with things we value the most: kindness, love, grace, mercy, safety, softness, joy. We are working hard to weave this into our children’s lives every day. Our home is loud, a little messy, and predictable. We have routines, and we’re present, and we’re making mistakes and it’s okay- it’s safe to make mistakes here. We say sorry, and we talk about how we can make it better, and how nothing can make us love each other less, ever. I finally knew what kind of life I wanted, and I am living it.

It’s tempting to blame our childhood or our trauma for our present state of being. God knows I’ve used it as an excuse to misbehave in the past. But I believe that we are all responsible for our own feelings, and it is not anybody’s job to make us feel better. It is not anybody’s job to heal us. This is a job only God can do, but we can (and should) actively and intentionally take part in it. But sometimes, we are blessed with people who will want to do it with us anyway, just because they love us. In the same vein, it is also not our job to make other people happy, or to fix them, especially at the expense of our peace. It’s so, so important that we sit with our hard feelings, and let people sit with theirs. We should be accountable for our mistakes, and choose to move forward after- whatever shape that moving forward may take.

I don’t think I’ve fully shed the masks I’ve worn for so long. Sometimes, they are more comfortable to wear than my exposed skin. There are still some spaces where I have to navigate that, people who have known me my whole life but actually only know the masks I wore. I feel like I am a caterpillar in its chrysalis, nothing but a soup of liquified cells, painfully rearranging its parts. But we all deserve to be seen and to be known, even when we’re in the middle of unbecoming. It’s the only way we can determine the places where we want to be — the places where we are loved for exactly who we are, bones, liquified parts, and all.