The Path that Formed Me

I didn’t “pick bad people.” I picked familiar nervous systems—people whose emotional vacancy felt like home, because that’s what I learned from the people I loved and needed most.

I’m tracing a path laid out long before I understood it. Neurodivergent, highly sensing, physically and emotionally reactive to things others barely notice. My discomfort didn’t fit the acceptable range. It wasn’t seen as different, but as wrong. And the fear of consequences for that discomfort made every moment fretful.

My mother couldn’t tolerate the burden of learning how to comfort, nurture, and shelter me. So I was cast as “too sensitive,” “dramatic,” “manipulative,” “too much,” and later, “crazy.” Once she offloaded the responsibility of soothing me by turning it into judgment—impossible, ungrateful—others eagerly joined in: her mother, her brother, then my sister. Any sign of pain, need, or boundary was met with distance, disgust, silence, shunning. Instead of bridging me to support, she ostracized me—building a wall around me.

I see now the water I was swimming in. And my boys were bathed in it too.

“For unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance: but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath.”
—Thomas Merton