I never recognized the dissonance until I became a mother:
I called myself a feminist despite being a devout Christian who preached and practiced submission to men and God.
I believed every person deserved dignity and freedom, yet I spent years convinced that everyone should live according to my version of faith.
I valued education, but abandoned my own one semester shy of completing my master’s degree in education. I believed preserving the appearance of a nuclear family mattered more. Many of these values, with hidden hurts, were passed down several generations. The gift I never asked for, but carried all the same, my inheritance.
Looking back on my first year of motherhood, I realized my daughter watched me, before she understood me. The eye contact while I sang to her, the way she crawled and toddled, behind me, and looked at me when I spoke to others, observing every reaction of mine. She was an around-the-clock watchtower. Within months, I became aware of what she saw in me after postpartum depression hit.
She saw my energy decay. She witnessed my self-loathing. She heard me curse motherhood aloud.
The dissonance ate at me, so it was no surprise that my long-awaited spiral and emotional demise began.
Two years later, I wanted another baby– I had a boy, another watchtower. The feeling of bitterness and resentment was setting in again. The isolation, the crying, the misplaced anger was creeping in and all I could hear was a voice saying, I do not want this.
I was desperate for answers. I needed a plan. In the wake of this decision, I took it upon myself to improve my mental health. My posture changed from meek, apologetic and shriveled, to that of curiosity and confidence. However, I am not sure I am ready to walk down that road with you just yet, as I am still walking it with my therapist. One thing for certain and two things for sure, there was so much that I had to reevaluate and let go.
It began with a slow shift away from the usual questions I had, which was, how can I be absolved from my sin? I reflected and instead began to ask, how can I love all of me?
To be honest, I did not know how. I inherited traits that made it difficult to love all of me. I was living life ready to quit on myself.
Years later, I stepped away from religion I had inherited. For me, it had become tethered to submission, shame and confinement. Letting it go allowed me to walk differently, feel braver, and speak with aplomb. It took a lot, but this is what worked for me.
I carried hurt from people I knew only briefly and from those who had once been the cornerstones of my life. For a long time, I believed that pain belonged to me. Eventually, I learned to set it down. I reminded myself that someone else’s cruelty, disappointment, or misunderstanding did not have to become part of my identity. It wasn’t mine to hold. I released it and kept moving forward.
The same became true of failures. Every rejection, life’s setbacks, the universe’s “closed doors”, no longer convinced me to stop. I learned that practicing resilience, meant making decisions to move forward despite hardships. I have learned that I am grittier than I ever gave myself credit for. I know I am capable of far more than fear once allowed me to believe.
Shame, an inherited trait, seemed to flow through the women in my family. My mother carried it. My grandmother carried it. By the time it reached me, I hardly questioned whether it belonged to me at all. Art found me early. I sketched, painted, danced, choreographed, directed, as creating was the language that felt most natural to me. However, shame lurked behind me and in weakness, I felt forced to reject self-expression.
I feared vulnerability. Pieces like this personal essay, where portrayals of my life become embedded in my art, would have never been published. Now, I am embracing vulnerability and building this magazine with every every part of who I am. Today, I no longer want to hide behind polished ideas or carefully constructed personas.
Reinvention has asked me to be seen. Every essay I publish, every photograph I share, every story I tell carries traces of my own life, of my truth. There is always the possibility of criticism, misunderstanding, or rejection. But there is also the possibility of connection and growth. For the first time, I am choosing that possibility over shame.
For years, I joked about things that should never have become part of my identity. I told anyone who would listen that I was a people pleaser. That I was too dumb or too poor to belong in academic spaces. Eventually, those jokes stopped sounding like jokes and became the stories I told myself.
To my misfortune, people built on those jokes and turned them into narratives. They projected their own grievances on me. Suddenly, to them, I was too brown. I was just a housewife. I was just a woman. Being born into poverty was never my mistake. Being a brown woman was never my mistake. Those were parts of my story, unchangeable truths. The mistake was mistaking other people’s limitations for my own. I claimed those lies as if they belonged to me.
Assertiveness, I discovered, is not arrogance. It is refusing to apologize for existing. It is believing your voice deserves to occupy the room before anyone else confirms it. For most of my life, I knew how to celebrate other people far better than I knew how to celebrate myself. I have always been surrounded by remarkable men and women, people who built meaningful lives through grit, discipline, and courage. I admired them wholeheartedly. I applauded every milestone as though it were my own. Still, I remain one of their proudest supporters.
Somewhere along the way, however, I confused humility with self-erasure. I believed the best way to lift others up was to make myself smaller. Every compliment I gave someone else was followed by a criticism of myself. “I wish I was as smart as you”, or “You are incredibly talented, I could never do anything like that”, and “I am too stupid to attempt an achievement of that stature”. I believed self-deprecation meant kindness and meekness. That had to stop.
Expansion has meant unlearning that habit. It is recognizing that celebrating someone else’s success does not require diminishing my own potential. There is enough room for admiration without comparison, enough room for confidence without arrogance. I no longer believe everyone else deserves to live boldly except me. I deserve to take up space, too.
For most of my life, I waited for permission. Permission to speak. Permission to lead. Permission to take up space. Then, at the turn of this year, in 2026, something shifted. I realized no one was coming to offer me a seat at the table. If I wanted one, I would have to build it myself.
My children are blossoming, six and four. They still watch me and learn from me– my beautiful little watchtowers.
But now they watch a mother who apologizes when she’s wrong, asks questions she once feared, reads relentlessly, creates without shame, and no longer waits for permission to exist.
They have watched their mother grow with them and each day, their mother’s love grows deeper for them, and for herself. They have seen her recognize and filter out inherited traits and values that no longer fit her.
In case you are wondering where I am now. I am one term shy from graduating with my Masters of Science in Psychology. I am an editor-in-chief to a rising online publication. My self-acceptance has strengthened and has been the catalyst to my transfiguration.
My beautiful children, inherited many things from me; I know, shame won’t be one of them. They will know how to love themselves fully and inherit the unstoppable resilience that teaches them how to take what is theirs. Always.
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