When I began paying attention to my thoughts, something unexpected happened. I realised my thoughts weren’t random.
They followed familiar patterns.
Almost like well-worn paths my mind had walked thousands of times before.
Whenever something difficult happened, the same thoughts appeared.
“You’re not enough.”
“You have to work harder.”
“People will take advantage of you.”
“Don’t trust too easily.”
“Don’t be too much.”
“Don’t need anyone.”
At first, I wondered why. Why did my mind always return to the same conclusions?
Then I asked a much better question. Where did these stories come from?
That question took me further into my healing journey than anything else ever had.
For so many years I believed these stories were simply my personality.
I thought I was naturally independent.
Naturally anxious. Naturally guarded. Naturally someone who struggled to trust. I thought I was just wired that way.
I couldn’t have been more wrong.
These weren’t personality traits. They were adaptations.
Somewhere along the way, a younger version of me had learned that these beliefs were necessary to survive.
The problem was… I never realised I didn’t need them anymore.
One of the biggest turning points in my healing came when I stumbled across something called Boarding School Syndrome.
I remember reading about it and feeling as though someone had secretly been reading my life story. For years, I had thought my experiences at boarding school were simply part of growing up. I knew they had impacted my deeply and had been a cause for much of the way I behaved in the present but I also never gave it the credit it needed.
I always felt everyone else seemed to cope. So why hadn’t I?
But page after page described feelings I had carried for decades.
Emotional disconnection. Extreme independence. Difficulty trusting. Feeling like you have to cope alone. Becoming incredibly capable while secretly feeling emotionally abandoned.
Always achieving. Always performing. Always surviving.
Reading those words wasn’t painful. It was validating.
For the first time in my life, I realised there wasn’t something wrong with me.
There was something that had happened to me.
And understanding that changed everything.
At eleven years old, I entered boarding school and spent the next six years learning to hide my feelings, cope on my own, and convince myself that needing people only led to disappointment.
One memory has stayed with me more vividly than almost any other.
Lying in bed at night, hidden beneath my duvet, silently crying into my pillow so that no one else in the dormitory would hear me.
I couldn’t even explain why I was crying.
I wasn’t homesick in the way people often imagine. It wasn’t one particular event or one particularly bad day.
It was something much deeper.
A sadness I didn’t have the words to describe.
So I did what many children in survival mode learn to do.
I buried it.
Every night I wiped away the tears before anyone noticed. Every morning I got up, put on my uniform, smiled, and carried on as though everything was fine.
Looking back now, I realise that little girl wasn’t weak.
She wasn’t overly sensitive. She wasn’t dramatic. She was grieving.
Grieving the safety of home. Grieving the comfort of being known. Grieving the freedom to simply be a child.
And because she couldn’t express those feelings, she quietly learned to lock them away instead.
For years, I thought those tears meant something was wrong with me.
Now I see them very differently.
They were never a sign that I was broken.
They were proof that a little girl was carrying far more than any child should ever have to carry.
At that age, you’re still a child.
You still need comfort.
You still need reassurance.
You still need someone to tell you everything will be okay.
Instead
I learned not to need anyone.
I learned to keep going, no matter how I felt.
I learned to push difficult emotions aside because there wasn’t always space for them.
I became incredibly self-sufficient.
People often complimented me on how independent I was.
What they didn’t see was that my independence wasn’t always freedom.
Often it was loneliness wearing a brave face.
ooking back now, I can see that I didn’t leave boarding school when I was seventeen.
A part of me carried it everywhere.
Into every relationship.
Every friendship.
Every job.
Every opportunity.
Every disappointment.
Without realising it, I was still living by the rules that eleven-year-old girl had learned all those years before.
Don’t need anyone.
Don’t make a fuss.
Don’t let people see you’re hurting.
Work hard.
Be grateful.
Prove your worth.
Those rules helped me survive boarding school.
But they weren’t helping me live.
For years, I thought these behaviours were simply who I was.
Now I know they were stories.
Stories written by a little girl doing her very best to make sense of a world that suddenly felt lonely and uncertain.
And perhaps that’s one of the greatest gifts healing has given me.
The ability to look back at that younger version of myself not with sadness or blame…
But with compassion.
Because she wasn’t broken.
She was surviving.
The beautiful thing about stories is that they can be rewritten.
Not by pretending the past didn’t happen.
But by recognising that the person writing the next chapter is no longer an eleven-year-old girl trying to survive.
She’s an adult who finally understands that she doesn’t have to.
