The Radical Selflessness of Being Selfish

Redefining ‘Sacrifice’ in Ending Generational Trauma

I chose to be selfish, and that, so far, has been the greatest sacrifice I have ever made in my entire life.

I am the daughter of a teenage single mother who was groomed as a minor and gave birth to five children before the age of 25. I have been a parentified child all my life, which gave me, for many years, chronic illnesses, terminal depression, and countless days of fantasizing about the day I could finally free myself through death, which at some point felt like the only freedom from the prison which was my life.

As a Filipina, I have borne the vow of silence, smallness, invisibility, and permissiveness that ran through my family for generations.

“Just keep the peace,” I am always told. “Be the bigger person.”

At some point I asked myself, “Whose peace am I keeping?”

Everybody else was at peace in this charade of harmony and unity where all conflict was left ignored, unspoken, and unaddressed. My mind, body, and soul, in turn, held all the war. My body kept the score of every hand that laid violence on me, every mark the words I received left on my body, mind, and spirit, and every single rumble my body made from negligence of all forms.

As all parentifications go, my mother asked of me the care she failed to receive, and while I fulfilled her wishes for a time, I found myself caught between a rock and a hard place: Do I prioritize my mother and her needs as my way of repaying the debt of gratitude every Filipino child inherits? Do I prioritize myself and my healing, as a way to choose my yet-unborn children who hopefully would not have to heal from having me as a parent? Or do I simply give up and take my life, or make choices that will kill me from the inside-out?

The greatest irony of my selfishness being the most unselfish thing to do rang very loudly. When my words were met consistently with deafened ears, the only thing that was loud enough to pierce through all of that was my silence, my absence, and my distance—literally and figuratively.

When raised in a culture where sacrifice is set as the gold standard—especially when such sacrifice requires self-betrayal, dulling the ache of harsh words, impactful blows to the body and the self-esteem, and the stinging pain of each absence, denial, and refusal to do better despite knowledge of the harm—the most radical, unselfish thing to do is to be the first one to ever dare to be selfish.

Parentification:

The Curse of Generational Role Reversal

Utang na Loob. Literally, a debt of gratitude. This is a term that every Filipino child has heard from their parents.

It’s a debt so impossible to quantify that it becomes equally impossible to limit, leaving many Filipino children burnt out, resentful, and burdened by responsibilities they never chose. We are always told that we owe our parents our lives, and, thus, everything we have.

If we were still alive, we must also still have something—anything—to give, right? Even if the weight of all this took away from our own lives, our own futures, and our own desires to live lives of our own. 

Many Filipino children in my generation struggle with depression and end up taking their lives for this very reason, and yet this is rarely spoken of because of the discomfort the parents would have to feel in having to face the effects of this social structure—which, although not built by them, are proliferated by them.

Refusing this responsibility is seen as a betrayal of the family. When our parents have provided for us and provided for their own parents, regardless of their imperfections and oftentimes their abuse, they tell us, “I had to do this too, so now you also have to. You are my child and therefore you are responsible for me in the same way that I was responsible for my own parents.”

Because this is a socially accepted phenomenon, the pressure of doing things differently can break anybody from the pressure of non-conformity not only within the family unit but also outside of it, and this is by design to force people into compliance to keep this cycle going ad infinitum. 

From the moment I became conscious, I’ve felt the weight of owing. My mom often said, albeit jokingly, how I owed her for birthing me. As they say, jokes are half meant. They contained certain truths to them, and over the years, I’ve built the feeling that I somehow owed them but somehow I was also held to some double standard—because I was “better”, “more gifted”, “smarter”, “had more opportunities”.

Like many Filipino children, I felt guilty for “having it better.” Every ounce of privilege I earned—regardless of my hard work—felt like something I owed to others. If I couldn’t uplift everyone else, I believed I didn’t deserve it either.

I remember the first time I told my mother I loved her, because in a literature class, something struck me about how time was limited. I do not recall the exact piece nor the exact analysis, but I do recall taking the train home, building up the courage to say those 3 magical words—I love you.

Walking the bridge from Recto to Doroteo Jose station, I whispered, “Ma, I love you,” over and over. Practicing. Hoping I wouldn’t stutter when it mattered. These were words I had never heard from either parent.

Every weekend, when I went home from university, I cooked her breakfast. At that point, I’d cooked her countless breakfasts over the years, and if I did not wake up early enough, she’d wake me up to tell me she was hungry and that I had to cook. As I served her breakfast that weekend, I felt myself choke on the words, as if they were stuck in my throat, until I said, squeamishly, “I love you, Ma.”

It took all my strength and courage to say those words, because those words were never uttered inside that home prior to that encounter.

She quipped, “What did you do? Do you need money? Did you get into trouble?”

I don’t recall much after that—just the sting of rejection. My earliest memory of my father was me reaching out, only to be told he wasn’t one to hug his children.

Both my parents came from difficult backgrounds. While they were eventually able to build everything from the ground up and create a much better life than they had for me and my siblings, they were rarely home, and when they happened to both be home together, it was never really peaceful nor loving.

I wholly admire my father and how he built his wealth—as a young man, he worked his way up from being a janitor all the way up to being one of the most important people in the law firm he worked at. He purchased a massive farm, and, after his death as I found out, a significant amount of properties. He had cars, and he could buy everything he wanted. His childhood was far from ideal but he was an admirable man where grit was concerned—and when I look back at his story, I could see where I got my relentless grit. He built something out of nothing.

Yet it was also normal for him to disappear for months, then suddenly reappear. I called him a kabute (mushroom) for that particular reason, because one day he’d be gone then he’d simply reappear as he pleased as if he was never gone.

When he was still alive, he’d often just show up at my doorstep at 5AM, rice, fresh produce, and fish from our farm in tow. But you’d never be able to predict when he’d do it, or when he’d even be in town, for that matter.

My mother was also full of grit—a hard worker, smart, beautiful, with a long line of suitors. She’s always been a charming person and was, as I was told, a bright presence. 

I never saw my parents okay. They didn’t officially separate until I was around 11 years old, but the very few moments my father was around was difficult for me, as my mother would often tell me the story of how she had only stayed with him because I mentioned that their fights and the prospect of a broken home impacted me greatly.

Some time last year, I recalled how I thought of the way my mother left the decision to stay in my hands. This was when I was 3 years old. I remember thinking then, “She literally let a 3 year old kid decide that she was going to stay with her husband, even if the effects were dire. She was not the adult making the decision.” Then I recalled she would have been 27-28 years old at the time. Adult-ish, at best. Probably very confused, especially with 5 children on the line. She eventually lost my elder sister when I was 5 years old, and without a doubt that also gravely affected her.

My mother did her best, given a very difficult situation that would break any person, but to protect her sanity, she had to numb herself and stunt herself emotionally. To be a better mother meant she had to feel the entirety of things—my sister’s loss, caring for an aging mother and a disabled sister, my father’s betrayal, and raising four other children, where one (me) had special needs she simply had no time, no energy, and no resources to address all of it—to do so, given her context, is simply impossible for most people.

I often found myself as the adult in the relationship, responsible for things far beyond my years: managing the household funds, grocery shopping, and even taking my grandma to the hospital by age 12. Since the age of 6, I was my mother’s therapist and emotional regulator, labeled 'mature for my age'—a maturity born out of survival.

While I definitely can thank those years for the ways I learned how to manage a home, build my negotiation skills (the wet market teaches a great deal of soft skills), manage resources, and build solid life skills I otherwise would not have at the moment—skills that remain incredibly useful to this day—it truly affected the way I saw myself, relationships, and me in relation to people around me.

I once saw a video where someone was talking about overgiving and tending to others as a form of self-regulation. I quickly realized that the regulation comes from being able to have dopamine from it, and a lot of things in my life suddenly made sense.

While I had no known addictions: I never smoked, never really drank, and was never into drugs (except for the prescribed ones), my addiction was helping other people, being useful, overworking, and being ‘good’, regardless of the repercussions those might have to my personal well-being and that of my spouse, and it truly wrecked not just my health, finances, and schedule, but it also wrecked my entire being and it was killing me every single day.

When I tried to draw boundaries or communicate the ways I’ve been harmed, this was seen as a drastic and unreasonable change. Left with no choice, the only approach I haven’t yet tried at that point to reach a state of equilibrium with my family was to be completely, utterly, silent, for the very first time in my life.

The Myth of Sacrifice: 

What Doing Everything for Your Family Really Means

Last December, during the holidays, in my now-many moments of reflection, I wrote:

“Sometimes, we grieve not what we lost, but what we never got.

The longing isn’t for what was—it’s for what should have been. And that distinction matters. You’re grieving an absence, an emptiness where safety, love, and nurture should have been abundant, but wasn’t. It’s not easy to sit with that grief—how can you grieve something you never had? It’s hard to acknowledge that some chapters of your story were written in ink you never would have chosen.

…And yet, even in this grief, there’s such wisdom to be found. You’re aware of the illusion, of the rose-tinted glasses, of the way nostalgia can sometimes rewrite pain into something softer, something that quiets the ache by planting doubt of how it wasn’t so bad, and how somehow perhaps you were the problem, or that others had it worse so you should repress all complaints, as if your silence cured their hurts. And you still choose honesty—you choose to see it for what it is, and what it isn’t.” 

The holidays are often a time for family, Christmas cheer, togetherness, and unity. At Christmas time, we’re often called to give gifts to one another. We are called to generosity and sacrifice, and we celebrate the birth of Christ. The importance of family is highlighted at this time, and times like these poured salt into the very fresh mother wounds I had, the ache of the love I still held for my mother which outweighed any anger I felt for her, and the internal conflict of going against what I had been conditioned all my life to do: to sacrifice for everybody else and ignore my own well-being.

And yet, I was also deeply aware of the years I had spent with chronic illness and pain, the many nights I spent in deep torment and questioning why I had been born, and the many instances these have been deliberately misunderstood as a means to avoid the pain of confronting their contribution to its manifestation—and while this last one is something I can understand and empathize with given the difficulties each of my family members have undergone, how it equally should not be something I continue to excuse.

Sacrifice is romanticized in cultures where family loyalty is sacred: fathers working tirelessly, mothers burying their dreams, and children giving up their futures for the family. But behind these stories are individuals who quietly grieve the life they might have had, whispering prayers of ‘what if’ into their pillows each night. I, too, intimately know that grief.

I’ve heard many versions of the phrase, “I’ll do anything for my family.” But I wondered—did they understand that sometimes, “anything” includes letting them go so they can learn their own strength?

I’ve decided to refuse the role of savior, caretaker, problem-solver, and peacemaker precisely for my family, regardless of the grief, criticisms, and different kinds of blow I’ve had to endure, because it was clear to me that my doing all of that for them harmed not only me, my spouse, and my future children, but it also harmed my family of origin—it robbed them of their faith in themselves, in their ability to find their own solutions, and in their ability to do better, because I set the precedent that their harm and disrespect can go unchecked.

I had to face myself with radical honesty: what was I enabling by refusing to give natural consequences to certain actions? What was I unintentionally supporting by keeping quiet about the wrongs I observe? What harms was I silently justifying by refusing to insist on addressing them? And why was I doing all of that?

It was actually painful to realize that I was enabling their abuse not only to me but to each other, that my quietness unintentionally supported their wrongs not only to me, not only to our family of origin, but the wrongs I can directly observe in other facets of their lives, and that I silently justified the way they harmed not only me but everyone around them in some way because when those harms were done to me, I refused to insist to address them and instead justified them to prevent the confrontation of my role as enabler.

The most painful truth was that I did all of that—the facade of ‘sacrifice’: providing, helping, and listening to my family, putting out fires I did not start, justifying the way I woke up daily with dread—because deep in my heart, I yearned for their recognition, approval, and appreciation.

There was a moment when the weight of expectations—both spoken and unspoken—felt like an ocean pressing down on my chest. I could feel the pressure of generations whispering, “Don’t let us down.” But drowning to keep them afloat was no longer an option.

The greatest sacrifice is to leave and choose self-preservation—to give natural consequences to harm and disrespect, to break free from inherited silence and invisibility, and to heal in ways no one in my bloodline ever dared to. It’s about granting myself the audacity to take up space and embrace life without inherited limits.

This is “doing everything for my family”: embracing the way I am certain to be misunderstood, certain to have my name dragged through the mud behind closed doors, and certain to face the consequences of carving a path that is yet uncarved—criticized by every person who has no capacity to know better, to understand, or to set aside preconceived notions of how things should be.

But I am certain that this is an investment for a brighter, lighter, and freer future for me, my successors, and my family of origin.

The Hidden Cost of Embracing Growth:

The Unspoken Grief of Ending Generational Pain

The one thing people fail to discuss is the grief that accompanies self-preservation.

This grief hurt a lot more than the endless questioning of why I made such a drastic decision (as though this is ever a decision that was made lightly), more than the way leaving had financial and social consequences, and even more than the way I had to face loneliness and lose many other people in the process too.

This audacity required a great deal of grief but gave back a kind of joy and fulfillment that was unimaginable to my younger self—in the same way that freedom heals, that healing requires a lot of honesty and grieving, things which are difficult to do when trying to shield myself from the pain of knowing not only when I have accepted wrong done to me but when I supported and acted against my own principles. 

To refuse to keep lying to myself is nothing less than a revolutionary act when it requires breaking social contracts put in place long before I was born, social contracts I was told were sacred and unbreakable, yet whose undoing is entirely necessary to give our successors a chance at a better life and a brighter future.

When ‘sacrifice’ is often defined as giving permission to be taken advantage of, mistreated, to accept words spoken from others’ wounds as our own personal narratives, and to be subjected to harmful expectations that erode the soul, that told me that I was never enough, am never enough, and will never be enough, the greater sacrifice is daring to be misunderstood, disliked, judged, and called outright insane and delusional—the greater sacrifice is to knowingly take the path of loneliness, to refuse to settle for less, and to dare to shine: which all goes diametrically opposed with all that I, since childhood, have simply been told to accept as ‘the way things are’. 

The most revolutionary thing is, in fact, to say and to own that, “I am enough. I have enough. I am good enough. I am lovable enough. I am worthy enough. I trust myself enough. I trust the wisdom of my own soul, my own body, and my own spirit. I love myself enough. I love myself enough to be my own advocate, the one which my inner child always longed to have. And that is enough.”

I hope we also ask ourselves this: “What does sacrifice really cost us, and how do we reclaim it?”

Trauma: 

The Physical and Emotional Toll of Silence and Compliance

In 2011, I was diagnosed with Bipolar Disorder and ADHD and received my PWD ID. Even before that, my body had always carried the burden of hidden struggles—from frequent hospitalizations as a child to managing a heart condition and chronic low blood pressure in high school.

By 2022, less than two years into my marriage, my body had become a battleground. I juggled a laundry list of issues like PCOS, long COVID, upper GI bleeding, and chronic asthma, to name a few. I frequented the ER so often that I knew some of the nurses by name. Humor became my coping mechanism for the list of ailments—each one a manifestation of the emotional weight I carried. 

For many months in 2023, it seemed to get only worse and I found myself bedridden, unable to speak, and sleeping for upwards of 10 hours daily. This continued to 2024, until I made the decision to leave Manila altogether and to prioritize my health in the boonies.

In 2020, after losing my father and countless others to COVID, undergoing incredible abuse from family and ex-friends, and grappling with the realities of a global pandemic, although my financial situation improved due to finding ways to make money online, I found myself firming up my plans to take my own life. Back then, I wasn’t aware of the way my body held on to so much pain. Pain was, after all, something I simply accepted as a constant part of my life—not a sign that something was incredibly wrong. Ignored long enough, it remains in the body unaddressed, phantomized, and while entirely felt, also entirely unrecognized.

It was only when I went on remission for clinical depression that I realized it, upon its release through the help of a spiritual healer (someone I never would have thought to go to, as a science-based, data-driven skeptic). From there, I had gone on a deep, dark rabbit hole of learning myself, learning more about the world, and learning the connection between trauma and the body. That was what began my journey to freedom. I went completely off medication in April 2023.

While that particular journey has not been smooth—as purging the trauma from the body requires all the things I refused to feel to surface, to feel them so that they can be addressed or else they then would have to stay and keep sending the signals they are meant to send—it has been among the greatest privileges of my life.

I remember how my anger surfaced when my guide told me, “Trauma is neither positive nor negative; it’s just an experience”, and how I started thinking about how he could not possibly understand what I had gone through, how trauma wrecked me in different ways, and how his privilege shielded him from being able to understand. But something in me, even then, knew how that belief missed the mark and offered me the comfort of the familiarity of victimhood.

Years later, I realized that he was right, and more so—that everybody, everywhere had some sort of trauma they carried, and how everyone was a kind of teacher either through pain or through comfort; through punishment or through mercy; through deceit or through grace—and that even our own bodies are constantly talking to us to give us all the information we need.

Listen: 

The Only Way Out of Trauma is Through

Internally, we all know that trauma is a kind of pain that travels through generations, and in many spiritual practices, we also know that all pain—trauma, anger, and negative emotions included—are simply information.

I had once written in one of my reflections that anger simply is a persistent messenger—she can show up in the most random times, in the most random ways, in the most annoying manner, and in the most inopportune moments, to remind us about all that we have chosen to repress. She finds many ways to try to communicate the sacred message she is asked to transmit, but when one is willing to receive the message and act on it, she simply graciously goes away. Often, however, when we realize this, we then would have to deal with the huge backlog of messages. We now have to sort through the proverbial mound of bills unpaid, notices ignored, and correspondence unresponded to. 

The number of decades it took someone to gather the courage to address this ever-growing mound would reflect the size of resolution required, but with enough dedication, discipline, honesty, and openness, one day, you’ll find that the mound is gone and that the letters come a lot less frequently, with a lot less intensity, and without the feeling of drowning in unopened envelopes we are simply too scared to open.

The truth is, a lot of the time, the messages we receive are far from ideal—we are raised on certain wants, desires, and expectations. We are raised in an environment that necessitates constant competition. We are raised in the belief that pain is constant, pain is necessary, and that we are meant to always seek the validation of others in some way that the pain exists at all and that we have earned the right to “deserve” treating this pain.

This is why I say that regardless of a world that both glorifies and vilifies greed in equal measure, that selfishness need not be greedy and that it is in fact entirely necessary. 

I’ll take it a step further—knowing that the consequence of refusing to resolve our trauma by constantly self-sacrificing, self-debasing, self-deprecating, and overgiving—this is a form of greed in itself. While the currency of this greed is not money, what this brand of “sacrifice” buys is some kind of social status, approval, and a justification of our own moral failings that we keep on refusing to address.

I still remember the day I decided to leave. I knew I was going to be misunderstood, as I had been a million times before. I knew I was going to be spoken of negatively, accused of being too sensitive, inconsiderate, or even making things up. And I knew they would make it out to be that one event, one instance, that they ever did something wrong—but it was not that one time. It was the millions of other moments that led up to that one moment, and all of it crashing down all at once when I decided I was done. 

And this is why, despite the certainty of their misunderstanding, I chose to walk away—not just for my survival but for the possibility of something greater: life itself.

Being ‘Bad’ is Okay: 

How the Identity of Being a ‘Good Person’ Hurts More than it Helps

When we embody the identity that we are ‘good’, our ego will try its hardest to preserve that identity and will act against our own well-being to keep that great social standing. Anything that goes against what being a “good girl” or “good person” was was something I refused, because my own internal identity was far more important than what was truly right, and it built resentment over time—not just for other people, but especially for myself.

To truly heal requires a great deal of humility—it requires the humility to know that, perhaps, we aren’t as moral or as “good” as we thought we were; that perhaps the truths we held were wrong or were built on faulty ground; that the identities we held for ourselves weren’t quite sound nor were they black and white; that perhaps the duality of good and bad was an illusion; and, lastly, that perhaps freedom and healing came not from doing more, but less; not from trying harder but in letting go more; not from seeking the truth but rediscovering what we already know; not from the hubris of knowing and control but surrendering to the immense greatness of all that we can never truly know, never truly control, and never truly predict.

Nobody is ever all good nor is anybody all bad. There is good in everybody and there is bad even in the best of us—and that is completely okay.

Being the Villain: 

A Path to Freedom

The freedom that comes with the radical nature of accepting ourselves as we are—not what we could be, not what we were, but as we are—is a different form of liberation altogether. It is a liberation that seeks to free not only ourselves but others too. It’s a humble kind of freedom that recognizes both our power and our insignificance in the greater scheme of things. It’s a recognition that while we are imperfect, it doesn’t make us any less worthy.

More often than not, however, it necessitates being the villain in someone else’s story. We become the catch-all of blame, of fault, and of betrayal.

Regardless of whether deep down they sought to have our courage to do everything they’ve always wanted to do but could never give themselves the permission to.

The greatest irony is how the admission of our true insignificance and multidimensionality is empowering—when we allow others the space and freedom to know themselves, to shine, to build the faith and trust in their own capacity, by inflicting the pain of absence which they may not readily understand—that, in itself, is a form of true and deep liberation. More than healing my body and prioritizing my well-being, I am allowing space for all that must come down to come down, to allow my family the space to rebuild in the void left by my absence.

Despite the ways I know I am misunderstood, I can truly say that the best gift I can give is my absence. This gift isn’t only for myself, my husband, and my future children, but also in fact for my family of origin. Should they refuse to heed that call to make the necessary changes for a different life path, I know that I also at the very least saved them from the pain of having constant confrontation with their own internal demons. Either way, my absence, while easy to perceive as purely ‘selfish’ and a moral failing, is a sacrifice that is both strategic and necessary, for existing generations and the generations to come.

As I let go of my need to be everything for everybody else, I accept my capacity to be empty and this void holds the possibility to become everything for myself and in so doing allowing myself to be everything for everyone else, in a much healthier way for all parties involved.

The Prison of Comfort: 

The Familiarity of Helplessness and Hopelessness

Many children have looked at their parents and thought, “Why does this problem keep happening? It’s so easy to solve. Why can’t they just do better?” Yet in reflecting on their choices, I came face to face with my own role in this cycle.

We keep on telling ourselves that, while internally we may gloat about how we were better in some way and how we were certain we were going to be better and make better choices. While there definitely is much to learn from the mistakes of others, fixing everyone else up actually is a distraction, usually, from addressing the fires that are raging inside our own homes.

I saw myself as responsible and better—attributes that fueled my desire to help. But at its core, the fuel was impure. Deep inside, it was a distraction to face the ways I felt inadequate, unworthy, and guilty of whatever privilege I managed to get my hands on. It was an easy way to see myself as better than others in some way.

To be honest, it took a great deal of introspection to truly understand and see what fueled my family’s questionable decisions, why they had kept themselves stuck in loops of highs and lows of avoidable problems, and why they felt the need to keep themselves in places, situations, and relationships that did not serve them.

I had to realize that I was forced to parent my own mother out of necessity—she had to be emotionally stunted out of self-preservation too. I had to cook for her, listen to her problems, emotionally regulate her, advise her, and do things for her because she had no such relationship with her own mother who herself was emotionally stunted again out of necessity.

There was a lot to gain out of this emotional stuntedness: she built friendships on shared misery, she built relationships on resonant wounds, she got some attention, consideration, empathy, and community from wounds they kept licking together so that they wouldn’t heal. The familiarity of that chaos, that misery, that constant rollercoaster of life—it is much too comfortable to leave.

Because she had grown up in chaos and noise, silence and stillness become dagger-like in the way they pierce through the membrane of her consciousness. They bring up many emotions—most of which, incredibly unsettling to have to feel. I know this because I had gone through that process myself, sitting in the stillness of the many dark nights of the soul. They allow the voices she’s repressed to surface. They allow the body to notice the pain from which it suffers in a way that busyness allows her to ignore. They allow her to see the ways she has been betrayed not only by others but by herself, and despite the years of depression, I can say that for now I know no greater pain yet.

I didn’t realize that choosing a better life comes with a cost too heavy for many—even for those we love, even when their refusal to change harms us greatly. I was also blind to the fact that choosing a better life and to truly love others unconditionally may sometimes require removing ourselves from the equation once we are confronted with the reality that our presence harms more than it heals and protects those which we claim to love. 

This ties into what I had previously mentioned—that each of us are more insignificant than we care to accept and accepting that fact is, in fact, incredibly liberating and empowering. When I accepted that in the greater scheme of things I am not important enough to make any of those sacrifices for, it liberated me from the prison of familiarity and opened my world up to all the possibilities of becoming.

Ending the Generational Curse: 

Breaking Free from the Prison of Comfort

To break generational curses doesn’t mean that I am necessarily better than every single ancestor that has come into this Earth before me—in a prayer I wrote, I mentioned there that every single member of the family has broken some form of the generational curses we inherited. Regardless of their imperfection as parents, both of my parents did their best and worked hard to grant me a better life. Despite my inability to stay where I was, I hold no blame for either of them—letting go of this resentment and blame was, in itself, a process. Being honest means that as much as I saw the bad and how it shaped my life, I also see, acknowledge, and praise the good. After all, nobody is all good and nobody is all bad, including myself. Yet it also doesn’t require me to go back to the battlefield that kept me fearing for my life daily, and made recovery impossible.

As I had previously mentioned, to choose a different path is to knowingly subject oneself to loneliness and everything that comes with it—the grave discomfort of confronting the self and our own demons, the immensity of the task that is getting ourselves into a state of radical acceptance, and most importantly, the heaviness of atonement and forgiveness, because for each person we forgive, we must forgive ourselves a hundredfold.

The fact of the matter is that if I had to undergo what she has undergone, I cannot guarantee that I, too, will make much better choices than she did. But knowing that, regardless of how I may empathize with her struggles, I have to recognize that she is not broken and she does not need to be fixed, in the way that I too am not broken and I too need no fixing. 

The truth is, wholeness is something we need to recognize in ourselves and the path to that is never anything we can impose upon another to take, especially once we know the treacherous waters through which we have to tread through to get there. With that recognition, we have to know that allowing people to stay where they are is its own form of respect. We respect their decisions regardless of how we may disagree, because we recognize their free will and their own capacity to do better, should they ever desire to, but that is a choice we can never impose upon another. 

As I build upon the work of every ancestor before me to break whatever curses they could, I offer this legacy: the audacity to carve a different path, to endure being misunderstood, and to stand resilient against the weight of the past while embracing the possibilities of the future.

This position comes at the cost of immense pain and countless nights asking many questions—on why I had been allowed to be born, why I had been allowed to be as gifted as I was (which, for me, was its own curse for a long time), and why I had the task to feel so deeply when it came at the cost of my own happiness and fulfillment. And yet—it comes with the privilege of learning to figure life out and having perhaps not all of the answers but more than I used to, and passing that wisdom on to the next generation.

The greatest privilege of all is this: I now allow myself to heal without cringing at the scars and instead wear them boldly and proudly as badges of honor from battles I have conquered, prisons I have broken free from, and the ways I have forged pain into something beautiful and useful, not only for myself but for others who can learn from this story.

It took me decades to say this, given an entire lifetime of suffering from depression, but I truly am glad to be alive and to have the privilege to have my family, to learn from them, and to have wisdom to pass on to others who may be going through a similar situation, as well as prevent this pain, hopefully, for my own children. Because being alive isn’t just survival—it’s a testament to the healing that blooms when you dare to rewrite the story, to alchemize pain into power, and to find the light in the darkest of places. 

While this immunization from depression is far from instant and cannot be transmitted through an injection, it can perhaps be transmitted through words, through stories, and through nights where we gather by the campfire, as our ancestors once did, passing on stories of strength, resilience, connection, and healing.

It is through this “selfish” act of choosing my healing that I offer the most selfless gift: a future free from the prisons of the past. Choosing myself wasn’t just an act of survival; it was a radical sacrifice that created the possibility of life itself.

And for the first time in my life, I felt that whatever I have and whatever I am is more than enough.