She didn’t start angry.
She didn’t start defensive.
She didn’t start believing everyone was against her.
She didn’t start exploding when she couldn’t take anymore.
She didn’t start believing she wasn’t worthy of being here.
She was kind.
Generous.
Considerate.
She wanted people to feel loved, wanted, heard and understood.
She wanted to fix things.
Actually, she believed that was part of her purpose.
If someone was hurting, she wanted to understand why.
If something wasn’t working, she wanted to find the problem.
If someone she loved was struggling, she wanted to help fix whatever was causing the struggle.
And because she could recognize pain in other people that resembled pain she carried herself, she thought maybe she could help them escape it too.
She tried.
My goodness, did she try.
And that is something I understand differently now.
Because for most of my life, I thought the battle happening inside me was between good and bad.
Right and wrong.
Kindness and anger.
Love and hate.
Eventually, I came to understand my own experience differently.
For me, the battle was between healthier and increasingly unhealthy ways of thinking, interpreting, reacting and living.
And I didn’t know that was the battle I was fighting.
Every time something was swept under the rug, I wanted to pull it back out.
Every time everyone pretended something was fine when I believed it wasn’t, I wanted to say it.
Every time I saw something I believed was wrong, I wanted to correct it.
Every time someone was hurting, I wanted to fix it.
Every time a system wasn’t working, I wanted to repair it.
Every time someone misunderstood me, I wanted to explain harder.
And when explaining didn’t work?
I explained more.
When fixing didn’t work?
I tried harder.
When speaking didn’t work?
I spoke louder.
When carrying everyone became too heavy?
I collapsed.
Sometimes for days.
Sometimes for weeks.
And then I got back up and started carrying again.
Because I believed that was what I was supposed to do.
I didn’t recognize that something could begin with beautiful intentions and still become unhealthy.
That’s one of the hardest things I understand now.
Wanting to help people isn’t unhealthy.
Caring isn’t unhealthy.
Empathy isn’t unhealthy.
Speaking up isn’t unhealthy.
Trying to solve problems isn’t unhealthy.
But without boundaries, those things can become something very different.
Helping can become rescuing.
Caring can become carrying.
Empathy can become losing yourself inside someone else’s pain.
Problem-solving can become believing every problem is yours to solve.
Speaking up can become fighting battles that were never yours to fight.
Persistence can become an inability to let go.
And eventually, when nothing you do changes the outcome, you can begin believing you failed.
That’s what happened to me.
I couldn’t see that maybe some things weren’t mine to fix.
I couldn’t see that another person’s healing wasn’t mine to accomplish.
I couldn’t see that another person’s choices weren’t mine to control.
I couldn’t see that sometimes walking away wasn’t giving up.
I couldn’t see that a boundary could accomplish what another explanation never would.
So I kept trying.
And every failure became another piece of evidence my unhealthy thinking could use against me.
You weren’t good enough.
You didn’t explain it correctly.
They don’t understand you.
Try harder.
Fix it.
Make them understand.
Don’t give up.
And somewhere underneath all of that was another voice:
This is too heavy.
But I didn’t listen.
I understand that voice differently through my faith today.
I thought God had given me the responsibility to fix everything I could see was broken.
Today I believe He was trying to teach me something entirely different:
It was never all mine to carry.
I wasn’t responsible for healing everyone.
I wasn’t responsible for making everyone understand.
I wasn’t responsible for correcting every unhealthy dynamic.
I wasn’t responsible for controlling the outcome.
I wasn’t responsible for saving anyone.
And I certainly wasn’t required to destroy myself trying.
But I couldn’t see that then.
So what I experienced as purpose slowly became pressure.
Pressure became exhaustion.
Exhaustion became resentment.
Resentment fed anger.
Anger fed increasingly unhealthy reactions.
And those reactions created consequences that gave my already unhealthy thinking even more evidence that something was wrong with me.
The cycle kept feeding itself.
And that brings me back to the story about the two wolves:
Whichever one you feed.
Except I didn’t realize I was feeding anything.
Some of the lessons had been fed to my mind before I was old enough to examine them.
Some came through repetition.
Some through relationships.
Some through painful experiences.
Some through things I watched other people do.
Some through conclusions my own mind made while trying to understand what was happening around me.
And eventually I began feeding those patterns myself without realizing it.
That’s what I mean when I talk about invisible learning.
I wasn’t waking up every morning choosing:
Today I’m going to become more unhealthy.
I thought I was fighting against it.
That’s the tragedy of it.
From inside my mind, I thought I was fighting desperately to remain the person I knew myself to be.
But some of the ways I was fighting were making me less healthy.
By August 2024, I believed I had finally lost.
Another job.
More conflict.
More relationships damaged.
More evidence, in my mind, that no matter how desperately I tried to do good, everything eventually went wrong.
And I couldn’t stand the person I believed I had become.
I didn’t want my husband to continue living with her.
I didn’t want my daughter to continue being hurt by her.
I didn’t want to continue being her.
So I tried to end her life.
She is me.
And by the grace of God, she survived.
What I thought was the end became the beginning.
It took healing for me to understand something I couldn’t possibly understand from inside that moment:
I hadn’t lost a battle between good and evil.
I wasn’t an evil person.
And I wasn’t simply a good person surrounded by bad people either.
I was a deeply hurting human being whose thinking, beliefs, reactions and coping patterns had become increasingly unhealthy.
Some things had been done to me.
Some things had been learned by me.
And some things were now being done through me.
That last part was eventually mine to change.
Not because the original wounds were my fault.
Because I was finally the person who had the opportunity to stop carrying them forward.
Over the last two years, I didn’t destroy her.
I learned her.
I questioned what she believed.
I followed memories back to the lessons attached to them.
I learned where her reactions came from.
I learned boundaries.
I learned that understanding someone doesn’t require rescuing them.
I learned that loving someone doesn’t require carrying them.
I learned that recognizing a problem doesn’t make it mine to solve.
I learned that someone misunderstanding me doesn’t create an emergency.
I learned that walking away doesn’t always mean giving up.
I learned that peace doesn’t require everybody else to change first.
And perhaps most importantly, I learned that accountability doesn’t require hatred of the person I used to be.
Because she was trying too.
She just didn’t understand what she was fighting.
Today I do.
And every day I get another opportunity to teach my mind something healthier.
She was the little girl who learned.
She was the woman who carried it.
She was the woman who fought until she couldn’t fight anymore.
She was the woman who almost ended her story because she thought she had failed.
She was the woman God wasn’t finished with.
She is the woman who finally learned that she didn’t have to carry everything.
She isn’t someone I need to run from anymore.
She isn’t someone I need to hate.
She isn’t someone I need to erase.
I understand her now.
I forgive her.
I teach her.
I take responsibility for her.
I love her.
Because she is me.
Shared from live experience, not expert advice
Healing Unlayered 
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