The people I relied on for protection were the same people I needed protection from. They were also the ones teaching lil baby Magda about herself, relationships, and the world.

And so she gravitated toward relational patterns imprinted on her lil nervous system long before she could recognize or question them. Always reaching for the emotionally inaccessible archetype…

She loved these people and wanted their approval, affection, and inclusion. They were her models for love, conflict, emotional regulation, and accountability. She mimicked some of their harmful behaviors, too. For how could she reject a model she hadn’t yet learned to recognize?

I can share how Lil Baby Magda was harmed without asserting I, Big Magda, never caused harm. I own my unwholesome and misguided contributions without accepting responsibility for how others behaved.

My first blueprint of the world was emotional instability, chaotic relationships, and illegible, amorphous rules and codes. My internal blueprint developed in response: my lens for perception, beliefs, vigilance, expectations, sense of worth, and capacity to care for myself, regulate my emotions and live with intention and dignity.

Life might have been confusing even in a nurturing, steady family system. I might always have required more clarity, consistency, patience, and support.

I lost decades tangled up in what the fuck had just happened and why, while forecasting what else would go wrong.

What did I do? What did they mean? What did I miss? How do I keep it from happening again?

Even when nothing was happening, I was still agonizing over things said and done years earlier. All that attention and energy spent trying to understand and prevent harm left no bandwidth to experience my own life.

How much of what I’ve believed about my personality, character, worthiness, and lovability came from the people who taught me how to be a person?

What might I have achieved if I hadn’t spent my life trying to figure out what was wrong with me?

The messaging was consistent, collective, and insidious: Get different or be erased.

If I was the designated problem and couldn’t correct myself, what was left? I couldn’t get different. I couldn’t get gone. I failed at both.

And now I’m beginning to see a third way.

Finally, I am getting different—not by correcting myself to fit the original blueprint, but by rejecting it.