The moment I stop trying to be the person everyone else wants me to be is the moment I begin to truly exist. Over the past few years, I’ve returned to writing, sporadically, as a kind of refuge—but also as a means of confronting the relentless churn of my thoughts. There’s nowhere to run, no exit from my own mind. The more I resist, the more it tightens around me—like quicksand, every effort to escape only pulls me deeper.
I’m twenty years old, and I have no idea what I’m doing with my life. I fear I’ve lost my sense of self entirely, and that my attempts at self-discovery have only driven me further from that elusive holy grail of “knowing.” Perhaps I will never know. Does anyone, truly?
From a distance, twenty years seems far too brief to know oneself—or, perhaps more accurately, to create oneself. But the environment into which I was born quickly molded me into something that never quite aligned with who I am, and I have been unable to confront this dissonance until now.
I picture myself crawling on the floor, grasping at the shattered remnants of who I used to be. My glasses are gone—broken against the concrete walls that hem me in, the boundaries of a life I refuse to be trapped within. It was an act of defiance, a rebellion that left me pleading for mercy and guidance, seeking wholeness in all the wrong places, convinced that the solution could be found outside myself: I chased “new” like salvation. But in rejecting everything familiar, the overwhelming freedom to choose became my downfall.
Perfection doesn’t exist—yet how do I convince the part of me that still demands it? My whole life, I’ve pursued perfection not to impress, not because I believed it noble, but because I was conditioned to believe it was the only way to be safe. If I could control everything, I wouldn’t need anyone. Hyper-independence became my armor—praised by society, yet forged in fear. I became the caretaker, the peacemaker, burying my own pain beneath performance until it almost disappeared. Almost.
Eventually, it returned. The muffled screams turned deafening. The sadness grew unbearable. The distractions failed, and I crumbled under the weight of my own emotional suppression.
“It’s not my fault—but it is my responsibility.”
I repeat this to myself, over and over, whenever the darkness grows too heavy. I am a version of myself I created to survive, but I fear that version can no longer steer. The overachieving, hypersensitive survivor has grown numb, and in my desperate attempts to reinvent myself, I overlooked the need to first uncover everything I had buried.
The abuse that my mother, sister, and I endured by someone who masqueraded as a trustworthy “stepfather” is something I may never fully comprehend. For years, I tried to forget, and in many ways, I succeeded, but not without cost. The dissociation that protected me as a child began to unravel in adulthood. I became reckless with my body, ambivalent about my future, incapable of making decisions because I no longer desired anything, and at times, not even my own survival. The strong, goal-oriented girl everyone once praised had vanished, leaving behind a young woman drowning in anxiety, mourning a stolen innocence.
To this day, I struggle to write about it. Memory returns in fragments, offering glimpses of truth. Objectively, I had a “good” childhood—divorced parents who loved me, a circle of friends, financial stability, and creative outlets. All of that is real, and still, I’m learning to hold that gratitude in the forefront of my mind while simultaneously grieving what was taken from me and the person I might have been, had my childhood not been so violently interrupted.
Again, I find myself on the floor, hands sweeping blindly for something—anything—that still fits. I am so lost, and the pieces I’ve been trying to reassemble no longer belong. They are warped by pain, their edges dulled and bent. I’m not broken, but the pieces I’ve clung to are. What lies ahead is something entirely new—a puzzle not yet faded by time, its image still unwritten. But to reach it, to lift it from the shelf and see clearly again, I must first rise from the floor.
Writing helps me reclaim my voice, to express the things I do not know how to express. So I suppose this is step one in reclaiming the pieces of my life, because through writing, I bring the dark corners of myself into the light.
(I am here, learning to hold myself unconditionally)
With love
Isabella Elena
Isabella Elena 