Inheritance Worn as Obligation

There’s a difference between love and loyalty. One frees you to be real. The other keeps you rehearsing your worth.

I’ve poured everything into this. Healing Thoughts II: 33 Poems and Meditations for Emotional Renewal is up for order now. These pages carry the deepest, sharpest work I’ve done, and I can’t wait for them to be in your hands.

They told me I was gifted,
but never asked what the gift cost.

Every nod from them
tightened the leash I mistook for praise.

I learned to breathe in applause,
to measure worth in obedience.

When I tried to say no,
their silence broke louder than any belt.

I built a future from borrowed dreams,
stacked so neatly
I forgot which ones were mine.

Now the mirror looks polite.
It thanks them for raising me
to disappear so well.

“Some parents don’t touch you with their hands. They touch you with their expectations. The weight of their unspoken needs becomes your identity. And by the time you try to figure out what you want, you’re buried under a life built for their comfort.”

Love, when attached to performance, becomes a leash disguised as belonging. Many of us learned early that approval was conditional. And that affection arrived only when we shaped ourselves into what someone else needed. It’s a slow kind of conditioning. The kind that teaches you to anticipate disappointment before it happens.

You might still carry the urge to please because the alternative once meant emotional starvation. Your body remembers the danger of disappointing authority. It remembers how quickly warmth could turn to coldness when you failed to meet an invisible standard. That memory doesn’t vanish because you grew up. It hides behind every decision that asks, “Will they still love me if I choose differently?”

Healing that wound requires disobedience. An honest confrontation with the rules you never agreed to follow. You begin by separating who you are from who you were trained to be. The voice inside that says should isn’t guidance, it’s a ghost. Let it speak. Then ask whether its loyalty serves truth or survival.

The process will feel like betrayal, especially if you were raised to equate harmony with love. But choosing yourself doesn’t destroy connection. It creates a new one. The kind that doesn’t collapse under the pressure of expectation.

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If part of you recognized yourself in that, ask:

Whose comfort are you still protecting at the cost of your own peace?

Scraps + Bandaids:

🕊 New messages drop most weekdays. Quiet, but not gentle.
🔥 Paid subscribers keep the wounds lit long enough to be named.
📚 When the pain overflows, it becomes a book.
🧢 Healing wears well when stitched into something real.
☕ This newsletter runs on coffee and confession.
🖤 Shadow Thoughts carries the pieces too jagged for here.

If this hit a nerve, you’re not alone. Healing Thoughts is where I say the quiet parts loudly. If you’re not subscribed yet, now’s the time. It’s only getting rawer from here.

“If you always do what pleases others, you forget what pleases you.” — John Bradshaw