After it all you become your own north star

“Self-awareness is beautiful. It is solid ground to stand on. Until one day you realize that awareness alone changes nothing.”

Initially, you are unaware of the wounds.

Maybe because the pain has been around for so long that it no longer feels painful. Maybe numbness quietly settles in. Either way, you move through life not realizing that you’re bleeding on people.

And that’s the dangerous part.

Because even the good ones end up carrying the consequences of wounds you haven’t acknowledged.

As time goes by, simply forging ahead becomes unbearable. So what do you do? You blame everyone else but yourself.

And woe unto the people around you because you’ve grown up in an era that has the language for these things. Suddenly there are labels for everything. Father wounds. Narcissists. Attachment styles. Trauma responses.

You become fluent in describing everyone else’s role in your pain while doing everything possible to avoid looking at your own.

But even that is part of the process of growing up.

Right?

Yes.

Eventually, you get tired of being a victim.

Victimhood starts leaving a bitter taste in your mouth.

And so you begin the journey toward self-awareness.

Self-awareness is beautiful. It is solid ground to stand on. Until one day you realize that awareness alone changes nothing.

Knowing your flaws and doing nothing about them isn’t growth.

You become the person who constantly announces their wounds.

“I’m just an overthinker.”

“I’m extremely emotional.”

“This is just how I am.”

And while there is nothing wrong with being emotional or sensitive, it becomes a problem when those things become your identity. When every conversation turns into a crisis. When every misunderstanding becomes a battle. When your emotions stop being something you experience and start becoming something you weaponize.

A few years later, you grow tired of that too.

You see clearly that awareness alone isn’t enough.

So you finally begin the real work.

It is such a painful route.

It hurts.

You lose people.

Solitude becomes familiar.

Once in a while, you fall off track and slip right back into old habits. It pisses you off. But you wake up the next day promising yourself that you’ll be better and do better.

Other days, the pain becomes almost unbearable. You seek the aid of your antidepressants. You wait for the medication to settle in as you make a quiet promise to yourself….that next time, you won’t run from the pain.

You’ll sit with it.

Feel it.

Face it.

Until it no longer hurts.

You remind yourself of the cliché that healing isn’t linear. And so you begin receiving even the most painful days with grace, reminding yourself that discomfort is part of being human and part of truly living.

There are nights you cry yourself to sleep.

And then there are lighter nights. Jolly nights.

Nights where laughter returns and life feels a little softer.

Slowly, you realize that you are no longer merely trudging through life.

You are living it.

You stop running.

And somewhere along the way, it starts to feel as though flowers are growing inside your chest.

You begin approaching life with a certain lightness. A softness. A grace you never knew was possible.

You breathe deeply again.

You feel at home in your body again.

Sometimes you look back and cringe at the mistakes you made while trapped in survival mode. The things you tolerated. The things you did. The ways you abandoned yourself.

But you no longer judge that version of you.

You understand her.

You know she was doing the best she could with what she knew.

And so you thank her.

Because every wrong turn, every breakdown, every uncomfortable lesson led you here.

You no longer bleed on people.

You don’t glorify overthinking.

You no longer move through life believing the world revolves around you or that everyone is out to get you.

You have learned to sit with your emotions without drowning in them.

You allowed yourself to truly grow up.

And somewhere between all the breaking and rebuilding, you became your own north star.

And once you become your own north star, you stop searching for someone else to guide you home.