What if the person I am today was shaped long before I even had a chance to decide who I wanted to be? My past is full of things I can’t change, but maybe it’s not about undoing them. Maybe it’s about finding a way to grow anyway.
Written December 2021, Copenhagen, Denmark
I have a tendency for counterfactual thinking. Not in a productive way, not in the what can I learn from this? sense—more like an endless loop of what if? What if things had happened differently? What if I had grown up in another home, another reality? What if my childhood had been softer, lighter? Would I move through life differently? Would I love differently? Would I have fewer scars—on my body and in my mind?
I don’t dwell on it for long, but this question keeps sneaking back in: How much of who I am today was already decided before I even had a say in it?
The Weight of the Past
I like to believe in autonomy, in free will, in the idea that we can reshape ourselves as we grow. And yet, I know that’s only half the truth. Because no matter how much I change, I can still trace certain things back to their origins. I can feel the weight of my childhood in the way I move through the world.
So, I did what I always do when my thoughts start spiraling—I turned to science. Read everything I could get my hands on about how early experiences shape us. And, of course, the research confirmed what I already felt in my bones. Childhood trauma doesn’t just stay in the past; it lingers, buries itself deep in the nervous system, rewires the brain. The Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) study links early trauma to everything from emotional dysregulation to chronic health conditions. It’s not just about memory. It’s about the way stress calcifies inside you, the way survival instincts become second nature.
And maybe that’s what I recognize when I look back at old versions of myself—the ones that existed before my most recent metamorphosis. Those versions of me carried the past in ways I wasn’t even conscious of at the time.
When the System Fails You
Even knowing all of this, I still tried to reach for help once. Five years ago, I walked into my doctor’s office, ready—finally—to ask for a referral to a psychologist. It had taken me years to get there, to admit that maybe I couldn’t do it all on my own. And yet, I was told no.
Because it had been over six months since my mother’s last suicide attempt.
Apparently, there’s an expiration date on being affected by trauma.
That moment stuck with me. Not just because I was denied help, but because of what it symbolized. No one had seen the years it had taken me to even ask. No one knew that I had only ever opened up once about what was happening. One rainy night in a hostel in Galway, lying on the floor, I cracked—tears falling in front of a friend for the first time. And then, as quickly as I had let it out, I packed it away again—for years. Moved on. Kept going. Because what else was I supposed to do?
The Seeds That Were Planted
Now, years later, I can say that I’ve healed in my own ways. Not through the system, but through movement, through writing, through carving out a life that is my own. And yet, when I look back at old journals, at things I wrote in my darkest moments, I see something that hasn’t changed.
The core of me remains.
Escape has been replaced by wanderlust.
Chaos has transformed into a quiet contempt for the mundane.
The darkness I carried has settled into nihilism—steady, but present.
These patterns, these instincts, they didn’t come from nowhere. They are roots that were planted in me a long time ago. And maybe they don’t need to be pulled out. Maybe they’re just a part of the landscape of who I am.
Rewriting the Future
But if childhood leaves its mark, if trauma plants seeds, then maybe healing isn’t about erasing the past. Maybe it’s about planting something new alongside it. Something that softens the edges, something that grows in the opposite direction.
I don’t know who I would have been if my childhood had been different. I will never know. But I do know that I have some say in who I become. And maybe that’s enough.
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