WHAT WE RARELY NOTICE

We rarely notice how much of our personality was built around what we were afraid would happen. I was thinking about this recently. Sometimes the person we think we are is just a collection of things we learned to do to protect ourselves. You become quiet because you don’t want to say the wrong thing. You don’t ask people for help because you learned not to depend on anyone. You don’t get too close to people because you already know how much it hurts when they leave. You want everything perfect because making mistakes doesn’t feel like an option. And after doing these things for years, you stop seeing them as protection. You just call them your personality. “I’ve always been like this.” But have you? Or did you become like this for a reason? I think that’s something worth sitting with. Because maybe growing isn’t always about changing who you are. Maybe sometimes it’s about finding out which parts of you are actually you, and which parts were built out of fear.