No more self - abandonment. Trust begins within

I want to write about trust.

And what keeps rising to the surface is this:

the most shattering moment in my life wasn’t realising whether I’d been accepted or rejected by others…

but realising that I had spent most of my life rejecting myself.

Being picked by someone else can feel wonderful for a moment—of course it can.

But the deeper turning point, the one that cracks something open inside you, is when you finally see that you’ve been abandoning your own knowing because you were trained to.

And here is what the generations before us didn’t quite recognise while they were “choosing” the paths we were expected to follow:

they, too, had been trained—

trained to fit the system, trained to follow the timeline, trained to keep up with the Joneses,

trained not to question the way things are because “that’s just the world”.

Trained to silence the parts of themselves that were aching, furious, hopeful, longing for change.

When you don’t like the way the world feels, you’re told it’s your problem.

If you don’t want the house–career–lifestyle template,

if you don’t want to move through life numb, compliant, exhausted…

then you are the one who needs fixing.

If you feel unsupported or unsafe, well—apparently that’s on you too.

Not the culture. Not the conditioning. Not the inherited fear.

For generations we’ve abandoned the earth, our communities, the animals, our own children even—

because long before that… we were taught to abandon ourselves.

We were taught how to live, who to be, what to value, how to appear successful—

and most of us never paused long enough to ask whether any of it was true,

whether it was nourishing,

whether it was ours.

Well…

sorry, world.

I refuse to abandon myself any longer.