When What Once Protected You Starts to Feel Like Who You Are

The first emotion I remember feeling was hatred, and even as a child, I knew somehow that it wasn’t mine. I didn’t understand why I was so hated or why there was so much rage burning inside of me. My first memory is wanting to run away, and in a lot of ways, I spent much of my life running from something inside of me that I was desperately trying to keep contained. I was depressed for as long as I could remember. I wanted to die. I couldn’t make sense of what I was feeling or why any of it was there.

As a child, all I really knew how to do was protect myself. I buried the child I never got to be, but I also buried the hatred, fear, and anger that had been given to me. Somewhere along the way, what I needed to do to survive became so intertwined with who I was that I stopped knowing where one ended and the other began. That child didn’t feel safe enough to come out, and the hatred was something I was determined not to put back into the world.

Eventually, I left home and chose to walk away because I knew I had to put my own healing first. But when I left, my entire life seemed to crumble with it. I remember sitting at the SkyTrain at midnight, homeless and broken, crying out to God, I didn’t live through all of that and finally get away just to still feel this way. I think part of me had believed that getting away would change something inside of me. Instead, I was left with everything I had spent years trying to outrun.

I knew how to protect myself. I knew how to keep moving forward. People could see me as confident and capable. I spent my career creating safe and supportive environments where people could not only heal, but be seen. That part of me was real too. But I still had no idea who I was outside of everything I had carried for so long.

That experience stayed with me in the way I worked with other people too. I knew what it was like for something that had once protected you to become so intertwined with your sense of self that letting it go could feel like losing part of who you were.

For someone else, that protection might look different. It could be not needing much, staying guarded, being the strong one, keeping quiet, staying useful, or trying to remain in control because at one point that was what helped them get through. What protects us does not always continue to feel like protection. After enough time, it can simply start to feel like part of who we are.

When I started breaking down the walls I had built and trusting there might actually be something good on the other side of them, it felt like walking through every memory and every emotion with no protection. At times it felt like everything would hit at once, like being thrown around in a tidal wave, pulled under and then somehow coming back up for air.

Eventually, the self-hatred and fear were gone. But I had lived with them for so long that I had no idea who I was apart from them.

There is a difference between knowing you no longer want to live a certain way and knowing who you are when you don’t.

For me, that understanding did not come all at once. What I did know was that every time I took another leap of faith on myself and trusted that what I had always known somewhere deeper inside of me might actually be true, I became more free. I began to see myself more authentically as God created me to be, rather than only through what I had carried for so long.

Somewhere in that freedom, I began to feel that child again. Not because I had gone backwards or become someone new, but because she had never really disappeared. She had been there underneath everything I had needed in order to survive.

I know how easy it is for what we have carried for so long to start feeling like who we are, because that was my experience. The fear, the anger, and the ways I protected myself became so familiar that for a long time I stopped knowing the difference.

And when I began to see that difference more clearly, I also began to see what else might be possible.