Going Back to the Branching Point: Learning to separate what shaped me from what is truly mine.

What if the parts of us we believe define us were never entirely ours to begin with?

The Buddha teaches that we are not separate from the world around us—that we are made of many elements that existed before us and continue to shape us.

Thich Nhat Hanh described these as “non-me” elements. He used the example of a flower: when we look closely at a flower, we can see the sunshine, the rain, the earth, the minerals, the clouds. The flower is made from everything that came together to create it.

The same is true of us.

We are shaped by the people who came before us, by the families we are born into, by the things we experience, by the beliefs we inherit, and by the circumstances that surround us.

For much of my life, I didn't know the difference between what was me and what had simply been handed to me.

I carried the unspoken things in my family. The fear. The silence. The patterns. The beliefs. The emotions that had traveled from one generation to the next.

From a very young age, I seemed to know things no one thought I knew. I could sense what people were feeling without them saying it. I became deeply aware of the emotions around me and learned to carry them before I was old enough to understand what they were.

In many ways, I became a caretaker before I ever understood that I was a child.

I learned to pay attention to everyone else.

I learned to notice what wasn't being said.

I learned to make sense of things that no one had explained to me.

And somewhere along the way, I began to believe that carrying those things was simply part of who I was.

But even as a child, there was another part of me that resisted.

I knew I didn't want to live the way I had been taught to live. I could feel that something was wrong, even before I understood what healthy looked like.

So I pushed against it.

I questioned it.

I acted out against it.

I began breaking apart the pieces of the life and identity I had inherited, even though I didn't yet know what I was going to build in their place.

Looking back, I think there was always something inside me searching for truth.

I wanted to understand.

I wanted to see every perspective.

I wanted to heal what was hurting.

I wanted to find a way to do things differently.

I just didn't understand yet that this search would eventually require me to discover which parts of myself were truly mine to keep.

And then I became a mother.

Becoming a mother changed the way I understood everything I had lived through.

I wanted my daughter to be free from carrying the weight I had carried. I wanted to teach her the things I had never been taught. I wanted to protect her in the ways I had not been protected.

But somewhere in the process of doing that for her, something unexpected happened.

I began doing it for myself.

As I taught her how to honor herself, I began learning how to honor myself.

As I protected her, I learned how to protect myself.

As I gave her the love and reassurance she needed, I began giving some of that same love to the little girl inside me who had gone so long without it.

I realized that breaking a pattern isn't simply about refusing to repeat what came before you.

Sometimes it is about learning how to become something entirely different.

My daughter has continued to show me parts of myself that I thought I had already healed—the places where I am still learning, still growing, still becoming.

She has been one of the greatest mirrors of my life.

And perhaps that is one of the gifts hidden inside motherhood: sometimes the person we are trying so desperately to guide becomes the person who helps guide us back to ourselves.

The Tree Had Already Begun to Crack

When I reflect on my life now, I can see the major branching point more clearly.

It was like lightning striking a tree.

The trunk had already been slowly weakening. The branches were cracked. From the outside, the tree may have still looked like it was standing, but underneath, something was already giving way.

It was only a matter of time before everything came crashing down.

I was around sixteen when I began questioning everything.

Who was I?
What was true?
What did I believe?
What was I supposed to do next?

I found myself at a crossroads, completely lost in my own identity and overwhelmed by depression, trauma, and despair.

Everything I had been carrying since childhood seemed to come rushing to the surface at once.

There were years of emotions.

Years of things I had never spoken about.

Years of secrets and experiences I had learned to bury.

And suddenly, it felt as though every branch of my life was breaking at the same time.

Piece by piece, I felt like I was being ripped apart and released all at once.

There was another moment in my life that changed the direction of everything.

I lost someone I loved very suddenly, and for a long time afterward, I couldn't understand how to live with what had happened.

I had spent the night reassuring him that everything would be okay, telling him I loved him and that tomorrow was a new day. By morning, he was gone.

I remember standing in the hospital unable to make sense of what I was seeing. Some part of me still believed that if I could just do something—anything—I could change what had happened.

But there was nothing I could do.

He was gone, and for the first time in my life, I was confronted with something I could not fix, control, or save.

I spent months barely existing. I withdrew from everyone and disappeared into my own grief. I didn't know how to carry what I was feeling, and I didn't know who I was anymore.

Eventually, I began trying to put myself back together.

But looking back now, I can see something I couldn't see then.

I didn't just lose someone I loved. I lost the belief that I could save someone through loving them enough.

And yet, somehow, I carried that belief forward.

About a year later, I became very close to someone who was struggling deeply with addiction and his own pain. We eventually spent many years together, and at the time, we both believed in some way that we had saved each other.

But now I can see another layer of the story.

Part of me was trying to save him because I had never made peace with the fact that I couldn't save the person I had lost.

I was still a teenager trying to make sense of something no young girl should have had to carry, and I had somehow turned love into responsibility.

If someone I loved was hurting, I believed I needed to be the one who stayed.
The one who helped.
The one who carried it.
The one who made sure they were okay.

I didn't yet understand that loving someone and saving someone are not the same thing.

For so long, my suffering had been internal.

I wore a mask and learned how to make everything look normal from the outside.

But inside, I was hurting.

I had lived with physical pain since childhood, including debilitating migraines that no one seemed able to fully explain. I had become accustomed to pushing through pain and continuing on as though nothing was wrong.

Then came a moment when a series of questions opened a door I had spent years keeping closed.

For the first time, I spoke aloud about the abuse I had experienced as a child.

I had carried the secret for years.

There had been shame. Fear. Silence.

And there had been so many things I didn't yet have the words to understand.

But once the truth was spoken, everything began to change.

What happened next was frightening and painful in ways I could not have anticipated.

The truth I had finally spoken could no longer remain hidden.

And suddenly I was forced to confront not only what had happened to me, but the reactions, denial, and consequences that followed.

I had spent years carrying something that had never belonged to me.

And yet I had somehow learned to experience it as though it did.

That realization would take me years to understand.

Falling Apart

The moment my life appeared to fall apart—the moment I thought I had reached rock bottom—eventually became one of the greatest turning points of my life.

It became my saving grace.

Not because the suffering itself was good.

It wasn't.

But because everything that had been hidden was finally exposed.

The breaking apart showed me where I needed repair.

The pain showed me where healing was necessary.

The stories I had carried for so long were finally laid out in front of me, and for the first time, I had the opportunity to decide which ones I wanted to continue carrying.

That was the beginning of what I came to call my spiritual healing journey.

It was the moment I found enough courage to take responsibility for my own life.

Not responsibility for what other people had done.

Not responsibility for their choices.

Not responsibility for their pain.

But responsibility for what I would do with my life from that point forward.

I learned that no one could save me from myself.

And that was a difficult truth to accept.

Because looking honestly in the mirror means eventually recognizing the places where our own suffering continues—not because we caused everything that happened to us, but because healing requires us to take responsibility for what happens next.

I couldn't change the past.

I couldn't rewrite what had already happened.

But I could choose what I carried forward.

I could choose which beliefs were mine.

I could choose which patterns ended with me.

I could choose what kind of woman I wanted to become.

And slowly, I began to understand something that I had been searching for my entire life:

Freedom isn't found by becoming someone completely different.

It is found by discovering who you are beneath everything you were taught to be.

Becoming Me

Sometimes I still feel foreign to the person I once believed myself to be.

And yet, I am still that same girl.

She is still inside me.

She is simply no longer carrying everything she once believed she had to carry.

She is stronger now.

Wiser.

More humble.

More resilient.

More willing to question what she has been handed and decide what she actually believes.

I used to think my life was defined by everything that had happened to me.

Now I see it differently.

Those experiences are part of me.

They shaped me.

They taught me.

They wounded me.

They strengthened me.

But they do not get to define the entirety of who I am.

The people who came before me are part of my story.

The circumstances I lived through are part of my story.

The things I inherited are part of my story.

But they are not the whole story.

Because eventually, we reach a point where we have to decide:

What do I want to carry forward?

What ends with me?

What do I want to become?

Perhaps that is what the idea of “non-me” means to me now.

I am made from so many things I did not choose.

But I am also becoming someone through the choices I make today.

I can honor where I came from without remaining bound to it.

I can love the people who shaped me without carrying everything they carried.

I can acknowledge what happened without allowing it to become my identity.

I can hold compassion for the past without abandoning the person I am becoming.

And maybe that is what coming home to yourself really means.

Not erasing the past.

Not pretending the pain didn't happen.

Not becoming someone you were never meant to be.

But gently separating what was given to you from what is truly yours.

Learning what to release.

Learning what to keep.

And finally, learning to look at yourself and say:

This is me.

Not the secrets.

Not the fear.

Not the shame.

Not the patterns.

Not the stories I inherited.

Not the things that were placed on my shoulders before I was old enough to understand them.

All of those things may be part of the soil I grew from.

But they are not the whole of the flower.

I am still becoming.

And perhaps the greatest gift of having my life fall apart was that, in the breaking, I was finally given the chance to discover who I had been all along.