Not Mine to Carry

People can try to shame you. They cannot make you ashamed of something you know you did with love, honor, and integrity.

There were days in my life when people believed they were publicly humiliating me. They expected me to lower my head.

My children were watching. I knew they were watching. And I wanted them to see what it looks like when you know who you are.

So I didn't lower it.

Not out of defiance. Not because nothing hurt. But because nothing in my own conduct required me to be ashamed.

I knew what I had done. I knew how I had shown up. I had acted with love, honesty, honor, and integrity. So I refused to carry someone else's interpretation of me as though it were the truth about me.

That became important, because there are things people will try to hand you that were never yours to carry.

Their judgment.

Their resentment.

Their inability to see goodness when it is standing in front of them.

Their decision not to love you well.

None of it has to become yours.

Someone else's inability to recognize goodness does not diminish goodness. Their judgment does not have to become your shame. And their withholding of love does not mean you are unloved.

That last one took on a deeper meaning for me.

Sometimes we become so focused on the one place where love is absent that we stop noticing all the places where it is abundant.

We naturally expect love from our relatives. We assume shared lineage brings love, understanding, and trust with it. It doesn't always.

There is a particular sadness in realizing that.

But there is also freedom.

Love comes from the heart, and people cannot give you what they do not have within themselves. Once I understood that, I stopped making their limitations a question about my worth.

Instead, I started asking myself one question:

Am I still expecting love from this place?

Because if the answer is no, its absence isn't a verdict on your life.

It isn't even a loss.

It is information.

And sometimes information is what finally sets you free from waiting.

This is what I tell my children:

Never measure the love in your life by the one place it is being withheld.

I needed them to understand that. I needed them to know that another person's refusal to love you properly does not create a deficiency in you.

You do not have to audition harder.

You do not have to become smaller.

And you do not have to stand at an empty door forever simply because you once believed it should have opened for you.

What we went through may have looked heavy from the outside.

Some of it was.

But we were not measured by what others withheld from us. We were held by what we knew.

We knew who we were.

We knew what we had.

We knew how deeply we were loved in other places.

And we knew what was true.

That knowing held us when circumstances could not.

That knowing carried us when people did not.

And that is why I have come to believe that knowing matters so much in the in-between: that stretch after your world has been shattered and before you have figured out what your life will become.

Because sometimes what breaks us isn't only what happened.

Sometimes it is what we keep waiting for afterward.

We wait for the love.

The apology.

The recognition.

The moment someone finally understands what they did.

The moment they see us correctly.

The moment they become who we needed them to be.

And every time it doesn't happen, we return to the same wound and ask it for a different ending.

I learned that I could not rebuild my life that way.

At some point, the question had to change.

Not Why didn't they give me what should have been there?

But What is actually here?

Who loves me?

Who sees me?

What remains true?

What is still mine?

And what have I been carrying simply because I haven't given myself permission to put it down?

That is a different kind of knowing.

And I think that is how you begin to cross the threshold.

You pick up the pieces of your life with discernment.

Some things still belong to you.

Your love.

Your integrity.

Your memories.

Your people.

Your capacity to begin again.

Those come with you.

Other things do not.

Someone else's judgment.

Someone else's inadequacy.

Someone else's inability to love.

The expectation that one day they will become capable of giving you what they have repeatedly shown you they do not have.

Those can stay behind.

There was love elsewhere in my life. So much of it.

There were people who saw me, valued me, stood with me, and reminded me, sometimes without even knowing they were doing it, that the circumstances in front of me were not the measure of my life.

And beside me were my children.

Watching.

Learning.

Carrying their own understanding of what we had lived through.

So I'll say to them again what I said then, and what I hope they remember long after they have forgotten the circumstances that taught us the lesson:

Never measure the love in your life by the one place it is being withheld.

Look around.

Love may be standing everywhere else.

And never confuse what is happening around you with what is true about you.

What I lived through was an incident.

A season.

A period in my life.

It became part of my story, but it was never allowed to become the meaning of it.

And perhaps that was the lesson my children were watching me learn all along:

Know what is yours.

Know what isn't.

And don't carry what was never yours to begin with.

Lenna

***

If you're in the in-between, sorting through what is yours to carry and what you can finally leave behind, you're in the right place.

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