What I Lost When I Thought I Was Winning

What’s the earliest childhood memory you can remember?

My mind didn’t stall for a minute when I was asked this question during my counselling training, taking me straight back to a memory from when I was two years old. My infant mind couldn’t grasp what stayed and what passed, when my mother started leaving me at daycare before I had enough time to develop secure attachment. I’d cry endlessly during each drop-off until she pointed at the fluffy Michelin Man on the side of the road.

What followed was a day spent happily playing with my friends, until my mother came to pick me up and I’d act as if she were a complete stranger. Still, as the most intelligent person I’ve ever known, my mother brought a Kinder Surprise each time to get me excited.

In the end, I developed a conditioned response, much like Pavlov’s dogs.

Gradually, my body stored that moment and hid it somewhere deep, labelling it not as a memory I could tell someone about, but as a sensation that tightened with pauses where the knowing revealed itself. Learnings that didn’t ask permission to stay built themselves into the walls of my nervous system, turning into a rhythm over time. I kept waiting to be acknowledged, which turned into attention, teaching me to read tone before words, to sense shifts in the air, to believe that staying connected required effort.

Placing the happiness of others above my own became my identity and I started showing up for everyone, even when it wasn’t expected. It unfolded like a ritual, my presence given as obligation, their expectation rising as if it were their right. To me, people were like a stomach, endlessly expanding with each offering, mistaking abundance for a birthright. Take the offerings away, and they ache, they growl, they rage, until they collapse back into their smaller shape.

Still, I invented burdens in my mind, countless and undefined, believing that love existed not through continuity, but through repair. The idea that love had to be earned and re-earned flourished, while I kept dismissing my own needs and worth.

While I longed to be seen, I wasn’t being seen in the way my soul asked for.
I was being seen in ways that served others.

Yet, I forced myself to settle, and it felt enough, until I had a fallout with both my best friend and my sister this year.

Things grew unbearable when the relationships I viewed as essential for my identity collapsed. Though the conflicts were different, they landed on the same ground when I lost the two people I thought I couldn’t survive without.

My best friend was only interested in restoring our relationship on her own terms. What remained was a one-way dynamic, no longer the friendship I had built a decade ago. When I realised our values were no longer aligned, I found the courage to admit what it truly was.

A habit.

My sister on the other hand, didn’t call me for months after our conversation that led my body to experience a trauma response. I wrote about it and sent it to her, yet she didn’t even bother to reply.

Slowly, I became the one who withered. From always showing up, I swung to the opposite extreme. Being responsive became a burden. I delayed replies, sometimes for months. Seeing messages on my phone began to suffocate me. While I left people hanging, my people-pleasing side still struggled. I was pulled between wanting to be loved and resisting the false architecture of love I had built in my head.

Yet, for once, the voice of compliance wasn’t winning. That was when I realised life didn’t hurt me just for the sake of it. It was asking me to outgrow a pattern.

I started asking myself,

Why did I stay in ways that required me to disappear?
Why did I confuse love with something conditioned?
Why did I believe closeness had to be managed to survive?

The truth was simple, yet it took me a lifetime to see it.

What I called living was, in truth, only endurance. Admitting it required courage, the kind I only found once moving away allowed me to separate my identity from those who “stayed.”

The reality has no soft edges.

People leave and there is nothing I can do to change that.

There never were.

In truth, my ache was rooted in the love I withheld from myself.

From the little girl who was scared of being abandoned by her mother before she was able to tell her left from her right.

The one who sought acceptance whenever she looked at her sisters each time they blamed her for being raised by her own mother.

The one who kept searching validation in the eyes of others while escaping the gaze that met her in every mirror.

I kept waiting to be chosen yet never considered that I, too, was a choice.

It was always me and that little girl against the world.
I just kept choosing the world over her.

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