Journal Entry: Carrying What Wasn't Mine

There’s this invisible weight I’ve been dragging — the kind that doesn’t make noise but still leaves bruises. The kind passed down through generations like some unspoken inheritance of guilt, duty, and denial. I became the emotional translator before I even learned to spell my own name. The peacekeeper. The fixer. The one who held space for everyone else’s chaos, even when my own spirit was shattering quietly in the corner.

I learned early that love in my family often came with conditions: don’t speak too loudly, don’t question too deeply, don’t need too much. I mistook emotional labor for love — as if my worth depended on how well I could hold the house of cards together. I carried their secrets like sacred relics, thinking that if I kept them safe, we’d all stay whole. But truth has a way of leaking through cracks no matter how tightly you try to seal them.

Somewhere along the way, I forgot that healing isn’t about holding—it’s about releasing. It’s about letting people face their own mirrors, even if the reflection cuts. I’m learning that compassion doesn’t mean carrying what’s killing me. That love without boundaries is just self-abandonment dressed as devotion.

Spirit keeps whispering:
It is not your assignment to heal wounds that others refuse to acknowledge.
And I’m finally listening.

These days, I lay the weight down piece by piece — the expectations, the guilt, the need to be the glue. I let silence do the healing instead of the hiding. I let tears baptize me back into my own belonging. I am not the bridge, the scapegoat, or the balm for generational denial.

I am the release.
I am the return.
I am the one who finally said—no more.