Some pain begins before we do. This piece explores what it means to stop inheriting old
wounds and finally rewrite the family story.

Some patterns don’t start with us.

They start long before we ever had a choice — in the quiet spaces of our families, in the words nobody said, in the pain that got passed down like an heirloom.

For a long time, I thought I was just living my own life.

Then one day I caught myself reacting, speaking, even loving the same way I’d once promised I wouldn’t. It was like looking into a mirror I didn’t remember hanging — one that reflected every wound I thought I’d outgrown.

That’s the truth about generational pain: it doesn’t knock before it enters. It shows up through habits, through fear, through silence. It hides in our parenting, our relationships, our faith. And unless we stop long enough to face it, we end up carrying the same hurt we swore we’d escape.

I grew up around people who survived by pretending everything was fine. Faith was strong, but feelings were private. We knew how to endure, not how to heal. I learned early that strength meant holding everything together, even when it was breaking you. And without realizing it, I carried that lesson straight into my own adulthood.

It took years — and a lot of broken moments — to understand that endurance isn’t inheritance.

Healing is. But only if you choose it.

Breaking the mirror isn’t about blaming the people who came before you. It’s about refusing to keep polishing their reflection. It’s saying, *This stops here.* It’s having the courage to see where the story bends wrong and deciding not to keep it going.

For me, that decision started in pain.

In the middle of addiction. In confinement. In the silence after loss. When everything I thought made me who I was got stripped away, I began to see the pattern clearly. Every voice that said I wasn’t enough sounded like an echo of something older — something not even mine.

That realization changed everything.

I stopped asking, *Why did they do this to me?* and started asking, *What can I do differently now?* Because that’s where freedom lives — not in the blame, but in the shift.

Healing isn’t glamorous. It’s messy, confusing, and slow. It means telling the truth out loud when your whole life was built on keeping it quiet. It means forgiving people who never said sorry, because you finally understand they were fighting ghosts of their own.

When you break the generational mirror, you start to see yourself clearly for the first time. Not as the victim of a legacy, but as its turning point.

Some of us were born to be the interruption — the moment where the curse loses its grip.

It’s not easy work, but it’s sacred work. Every time you choose peace over reaction, every time you tell the truth instead of swallowing it, every time you love without fear, you’re rewriting history.

And one day, when someone looks into their mirror and sees your reflection, they’ll see light instead of pain.

That’s how you know the pattern finally broke.