Leisha As a little human at 10, I learned that to be seen I had to play my part. My job was to be good, to excel, to lead. Not to be the best, just not to be a problem. I read the room, felt the moods, and stepped into the role that seemed to hold everything together. That was my first schooling in how approval and belonging can be used to steer a small person.
At 20, I wanted a safe place and I was scared. So I followed the program of what looked normal. Relationships, plans, the story I thought I was supposed to live. It brought years of heartache, but also years of growth and love. I can see now that even then, experience was already my teacher, showing me how fear dresses itself up as “this is just what you do.”
At 30 I was sure I “got it.” I could see the lies, name the systems, say all the right things. I honestly thought that meant I was free. I could point to what was wrong with the world, talk about control, talk about awakening. I thought clear analysis and sharp words were enough to stand outside it.
By 40 I knew better. The life I was living did not match the story in my head. I grabbed onto self sufficiency with both hands. I worked bloody hard, tried to grow and build my way out. Food, herbs, projects, plans. I thought if I could become independent enough, pure enough, productive enough, I would finally be beyond the reach of the mess. It did not save me from the deeper truth.
Because control is not only outside. It works by frightening people and then wearing them down. It lives in the fear of not belonging, in the exhaustion of never catching up, in the quiet shame that we are failing even when we are doing our best. It makes people feel small, stupid, and tired, then tells them it is their own fault. It shapes the “awake” as much as the obedient. I have watched it in others. I have watched it in myself.
At 50, I did not even notice age slipping in. I was too busy holding things together, tending land and people, trying to live my values in a world that rewards almost everything else. My body, my griefs, my limits all became part of the curriculum. Life moved from theory into the bones.
Underneath all of this I see another pattern, quieter but just as real. The more we are separated from the living world, the easier we are to frighten and demoralise. Take people away from soil, from real food, from honest work with their hands, from the felt sense that they belong to something larger and wiser than any institution, and they become easier to herd. Tell them they are consumers instead of kin. Patients instead of participants. Alone instead of woven in. Poverty, ill health, and constant stress do the rest.
My experience has become my teacher here. Every time I touch real earth, grow something, share food that carries the memory of a living root, I feel a different kind of education happening. Not the kind that makes you clever in the system, but the kind that reminds you who you are outside of it. Every time I listen deeply to another human being without pretending, I feel another thread of separation loosen.
These days I am less interested in being right and more interested in being real. I am watching where fear, guilt and humiliation still pull my strings, and choosing, one small decision at a time, to cut those threads. I am learning to trust the quiet teachings of my own life, even when they do not fit the story I once believed.
I hope that by 60, all I have learned and all I have done with that learning will mean something. Not as a grand solution or a shining example, but as one small life that refused to go completely numb. One little one flying close to the ground with broken wings, staying near the soil, noticing what is true, doing her best to live in a way that remembers we belong to each other and to this living earth, even in a world that keeps trying to make us forget.
