How You Became Someone You Never Chose to Be | The Inherited Ladder, Part 1 of 2

Part 1 of 2 of The Inherited Ladder.

There's a moment you'll know. Someone needs something from you, and you hear yourself agree before you've decided anything, and then you drive home wondering why you keep doing that. The honest answer isn't the kind one, because in that moment you weren't the author of your own life. Something was built inside you a long time ago, it runs from underneath where you can't see it, and it was built for a reason.

That something is a ladder, and this is the first time it gets walked rung by rung, in order, from the bottom to the top. A fear of being cast out, which hardens into obligation, which gets enforced by guilt, which you pay off through self-betrayal, which breeds a resentment you're not allowed to feel, which settles into a deadness that cuts the power to your wanting, until you reach the top and find you've become someone you never chose, in a life you never built. By the end you'll know the exact rung you're standing on.

Part 2, on Thursday, is the two things nobody tells you: that it isn't your fault, and that there's a way off.

Michael Lauria

The Architect