The Lies We Were Taught and the Selves We Are Becoming

From the moment we enter the world, we begin learning lessons long before we understand language. We learn them through the way we are looked at, the way affection is given or withheld, the way praise is earned instead of freely offered. Long before we are old enough to decide who we are, we are told who we should be. Quietly. Repeatedly. Sometimes lovingly. Sometimes violently.

You are too much.
You are not enough.
Be smaller. Be quieter. Be better. Be different.

These messages rarely arrive as cruelty alone. Often they arrive wrapped in expectation, comparison, or survival. And because we are children, because we depend on others to survive, we absorb them. We do not question them. We do not challenge them. We take them into our bodies and begin building our identities around them as if they are unchangeable truths.

No one teaches us that beliefs are something we can examine. No one sits us down and says, you are allowed to ask where this story came from. You are allowed to decide whether it belongs to you.

Instead, we grow up carrying invisible weights we never chose.

Imagine this. I place a rock in front of you and say, this rock represents your worthlessness. For that meaning to enter your life, you would have to reach out and take it. You would have to decide, consciously or unconsciously, to carry it with you. If you refuse, I am left holding the rock. The meaning never becomes yours.

This is how every limiting belief works.

Someone speaks it.
Someone else accepts it.
And over time, it hardens into something that feels like fact.

But here is what we rarely stop to consider. Why did we accept these beliefs so easily? Why did we never go back to reexamine them? Why did we never ask whether they truly align with who we are at our core?

The answer is not weakness. The answer is survival.

As children, we learn that belonging often feels safer than authenticity. We learn that being loved sometimes requires being smaller, quieter, or more agreeable than we truly are. So we adapt. We shape ourselves around expectations that were never designed with our wholeness in mind.

And in doing so, we lose access to parts of ourselves that were never meant to disappear.

Here is the truth that deserves space in your body. Those limiting beliefs were never yours to begin with. They were inherited, projected, absorbed from people who were often carrying their own unresolved wounds. They were never a reflection of your value. They were reflections of someone else’s fear, pain, or inability to see clearly.

That is why they feel heavy. That is why they feel foreign. That is why something in you has always resisted them, even when you believed them.

That resistance is not rebellion. It is remembrance.

You feel drawn to certain qualities for a reason. Strength. Gentleness. Creativity. Freedom. Courage. These are not things you admire because you lack them. You recognize them because they live in you already. They are echoes of the self you were before the world taught you to hide.

There is a version of you that was never allowed to fully exist. A version that learned to wear masks to survive, to perform acceptability, to trade authenticity for safety. That version is not weak. That version was brilliant at staying alive.

But survival is not the same as living.

At some point, the soul begins to ache for more than endurance. It begins to ask deeper questions. Who am I beneath the stories I was told? Who might I become if I stopped carrying what was never mine?

This is the work of becoming. Not transforming into someone else, but reclaiming the self that has always been waiting beneath the layers. It is the quiet, courageous act of setting down stones you never chose to carry. Of unlearning what harmed you. Of allowing yourself to be seen without armor.

You do not need permission to do this. You never did.

The version of you that longs for light is not naïve. It is ancient. It remembers who you were before fear taught you to doubt yourself. It remembers the truth that was never erased, only covered.

And when you begin to reclaim that self, when you choose to stop accepting the lies handed to you, something shifts. The world does not suddenly become gentle. But you become grounded. You become rooted in a truth that cannot be taken from you.

You realize you were never broken.
You were shaped by stories that were not yours to keep.

And now, you get to decide which ones you will carry forward.