You Were Right. You Win

You were right.

In my early twenties, during my first years studying and training as a trauma-healing specialist, there wasn’t a single person who didn’t tell me the same thing:

Stop trying to make your family understand you.

It’s not that I didn’t believe them.

I just didn’t know how to let go of the idea of my family.

I couldn’t release the belief that of course they would try. Of course they would go to the ends of the earth to understand me. They were good people, and I was a good person — so surely they would recognize the goodness in my intentions, my growth, my becoming. I truly couldn’t imagine a world in which they wouldn’t come around, wouldn’t support me, wouldn’t love me unconditionally in the way I had once felt mirrored and held.

So I didn’t give up.

I couldn’t give up.

I didn’t want to believe that people I had just met could see my family more clearly than I could — people who hadn’t known them my entire life. I thought persistence was love. I thought endurance meant loyalty. I thought if I just explained myself well enough, lived well enough, healed enough, they would finally see me.

But you knew.

You were right.

I don’t have many regrets in my life. But I regret how many years I gave up, and how much burnout I carry now, from ignoring those who told me to stop trying — and instead lean into the love that was already available to me. Love that encouraged and supported growth, not love that only existed when I stayed familiar, manageable, and beneficial to the system that raised me.

The more I stepped into my autonomy, the clearer my boundaries became, the more resistance I faced. I truly believed at least one of them would want to understand the world I came from — would take the time to feel into what shaped me into who I am today. But I’ve learned something painful and simple:

If someone cannot see who you are now, they will not spend the energy trying to understand how you became this person.

I was naïve about consciousness. I assumed wisdom naturally deepened with age. I believed that because my awakening happened young, my family would eventually follow — that proximity and blood would pull them along. So I waited. I stalled my life. I said no to friends, no to moving, no to incredible work opportunities, no to expanding relationships that came easily to me only because I had already fought so hard to become someone capable of connection.

I didn’t realize how hard it would be to relearn life after shrinking it.

Families that benefit from your lack of boundaries have no incentive to learn about mirroring, attunement, or autonomy. There is no motivation to change what already serves them. And I truly believed love would be reason enough.

It wasn’t.

I regret the last twelve years. I regret how much life I put on hold — the friendships, the momentum, the becoming — to make room for people I was conditioned to believe would love me no matter what.

Oprah once said some families don’t have the capacity to love as big as you are. And while I believe you don’t need to understand someone to love them, I’ve learned this truth too:

To love someone at the level of their becoming requires sacrifice, flexibility, and change.

My family loves me — but they do not understand me. And continuing to seek understanding there has been detrimental to my health and well-being.

I exist in their lives.

They do not exist in mine.

They know their children, their homes, their dramas — but they do not know my friends, my inner world, my pain, my prospects, or my dreams. And the part of me that always knew this wasn’t strong enough to save me from it.

My family was taught that family comes before everything. But when one person in that system begins to think freely, autonomy becomes a threat. Protection turns into control. Contradictions. Love becomes a rubber band — stretching just enough to let you explore, then snapping you back the moment you start believing there is support beyond the nest.

I was conditioned to believe I couldn’t survive without it.

And I did something devastating:

I abandoned the life I was building — a life filled with belonging, freedom, and resonance — because my family told me it was time to come home. That playtime was over. That real life was waiting somewhere smaller.

No one looked at the light in my eyes.

No one asked why I was alive again.

And that’s when I learned something that shattered me:

If someone cannot recognize your light, they have no idea how much pain you’ve been in.

I truly believed my family knew how much I was suffering. I thought they just didn’t know how to help. But they didn’t know at all. And if they didn’t know my pain, they couldn’t understand what I was seeking when I left — or what I was building — or who I was becoming.

Mirroring is the experience of having your inner world recognized without correction or dismissal. When it’s present, especially in families, it builds self-trust, emotional regulation, and a stable identity. When it’s absent, people learn to suppress their truth, doubt themselves, and seek validation externally — often at the cost of their nervous system, their relationships, and their sense of self.

And when mirroring is consistently absent, the damage goes deeper: fragmentation, dissociation, people-pleasing, hypervigilance, and a quiet belief that your needs are unsafe.

I kept offering my heart to a brick wall, hoping it would turn into a mirror.

Every time I shared my dreams, my art, my healing work — I was met with misunderstanding. And when you keep opening your heart to something that cannot reflect you, you don’t just get hurt — you get depleted. Burnout becomes your baseline. Ambition collapses into survival.

I didn’t realize how much early trauma gave me the capacity to understand others deeply — and how rare that depth actually is. Without having walked through that kind of despair, most people will never understand the consciousness it creates.

So here I am, left with a family who connected the wrong dots, who tells themselves a story about their son and brother that has nothing to do with the truth of my life.

And eventually, you have to stop explaining your movie to people watching it through the wrong lens.

I tried to be smaller. I tried to fit a circle into a square. I left paradise because I felt guilty for being free. I lost everything they warned me I would lose.

And they were right.

I chased love where it couldn’t exist — and pushed away the love that could save me.

So this is me saying thank you.

To the ones who told me not to go back.

To the ones who offered homes, countries, safety, belonging.

To the ones who mirrored me when my family couldn’t.

You were right.

And I’m sorry.

Not sure if I’m more sorry to you — or to myself.

But I’m still here. And that means this isn’t the end.

The solution is the same as it’s always been:

Follow the light. Follow the art. Trust consciousness over conditioning.

I can still show up when needed.

But I cannot give up my life anymore.

Thank you for being my mirror.

Those who get it, get it.

And those who don’t — I understand why.

How could you?

It hasn’t happened to you.

And thank God.

With Love,

~ Cody