Self-Worth – Becoming Unboxed

The War in My Mind

The six hearts came before I understood why there had to be six.

Because how does one heart describe how a beautiful life that once held longing, hope, purpose, and possibility became a battlefield of destruction that no one else could see?

The damage was not visible in my physical appearance, yet internally, I was being torn apart.

One heart could not tell that story. The damage itself could not either. It became a festering wound that tried to kill me slowly enough that even I could barely notice.

The first heart is colorful, vibrant, pure.

It has fine, small, intertwined vines—nothing sharp, nothing controlling. They are simply part of it.

There is an abundance of light. Innocence, love, and happiness without question or delay. Hope grows everywhere. Growth is made of a world of possibilities.

The heart does not question itself. It does not brace for anything. It simply exists.

Safety is natural, normal—a given.

There is an innocent longing.

Hope.

Purpose.

Possibility.

The belief in a happy ending is natural, even when life is difficult. There are dreams that something beautiful is ahead.

The second heart is where life begins to change.

The darkness moves in ever so slowly.

The thorns take root and grow stronger as they thrive on darkness. The painful thorns begin wrapping around the heart, just a little at first.

Not enough to panic.

Not enough to fully understand.

Simply enough to know something is different.

Something is wrong.

The darkness begins moving in. It does not crowd out hope or love, but the heart begins questioning its existence because the thorns have slowly caused pain. The darkness creates force fields and safeguards to protect the heart.

The darkness does not take everything.

There is still light.

There is still a recognizable version of the life that existed before.

But now there is awareness.

Caution.

The darkness begins to numb the senses because love is starting to become painful and frightening.

And this awareness changes everything.

The third heart is the beginning of the end.

Not breaking.

Not shattering.

Melting.

The pain becomes unbearable, far too intense to maintain a grip on hope.

The colors begin to run. The edges no longer hold their shape. The thorns tighten, and the darkness spreads farther across the heart.

There is still something that resembles the mind that once was, but the darkness begins to win, and the heart begins to burn. The darkness no longer controls only itself; it conquers the light as well, nearly burning everything to the ground.

The mind no longer knows how to hold itself together, and with it, the heart begins to be consumed.

This is the part people do not always understand.

A person can still look like themselves while everything inside their mind is collapsing.

Still go to work.

Still answer questions.

Still solve problems.

Still smile when someone speaks and engages them.

They can still be the caregiver.

Still perform the tasks required of an ordinary life.

And all the while, their heart is melting beneath the burning mind, hidden beneath the smiling mask.

The fourth heart is almost entirely consumed by a feelingless numb existence.

It is almost entirely dark.

There is very little hope.

The pain is too great.

Happiness has left.

The heart has allowed so much darkness to enter the mind that the vines are now a circle of thorns, which have nearly swallowed the heart completely. Almost all hope is lost, and the wounds are deep. The mind does not want the heart to be visible. It allows the darkness to surround it.

Yet this is not sadness.

It is something deeper.

The person you once were becomes so distant that the realization sets in, and you begin to wonder whether you ever existed in any version you knew.

There is no clear beginning or ending to the pain anymore.

No clean line between the heart and the darkness of the mind.

Only survival.

Only the smallest remaining spark of the mind, a piece still beating in the heart beneath everything that tried to bury it.

This is the battlefield no one sees.

The one no one should ever have to imagine or experience.

Yet from the outside, no one looks into your eyes and sees the black hole of numbing existence you have fallen into.

From the outside, they believe you are fine.

Sometimes you keep the mask on because even you want to pretend to believe that you are happy.

There may be no blood.

No broken bones.

No visible wound.

Nothing concrete that the world can validate.

Only numbness for the heart and emptiness for the mind.

Inside, everything familiar has been destroyed.

Safety.

Trust.

Identity.

Hope.

The ability to believe your own body when it tells you that you are safe becomes impossible.

This creates the worst wound because somehow, you are still expected to walk through the world as though nothing happened.

Only the fifth heart has some ability to allow hopes light to begin to return.

This occurs by sheer force of will.

A desire to see another sunrise.

A belief that the small spark of sunrise—of hope—is truly a reality and not some sort of cosmic joke.

But the light does not defeat the darkness immediately.

It is a slow, painful process, and it does not occur all at once.

It isn’t dramatic.

Only a very small section of purpose opens.

A sliver of color, light, warmth, and meaning.

The mind becomes a place where the darkness no longer owns everything.

But the heart grows back slowly and smaller. Sometimes a different shape or purpose is the only way growth can begin.

Flowers begin growing around the thorns again—the ones allowed this time around, the ones chosen to help growth have meaning again.

The thorns have not disappeared.

They are evidence that the mind grew differently, more cautiously.

The flowers grow beside the thorns, not to reflect the pain they created, but in spite of them altogether.

The heart is not restored to what it was before.

The mind changed it forever.

Instead, it is becoming something else.

Something better, more relentless, and far more resilient.

Something both wounded and living at the same time.

Fear still exists.

So does grief.

Along with all the memories as proof of existence.

Some days, the darkness still feels closer than anyone wants.

But growth has also brought other things.

Understanding.

Voice.

Connection.

Truth.

And perhaps most importantly, the realization that survival was never supposed to be the end of the story.

The final version of the heart has grown into something extraordinary.

The mind finally realizes it could never return to the version of the heart that existed at the beginning.

Instead, it had to grow into something new.

The untouched light of the first heart is gone.

The mind is different because the first heart believed in possibility without ever having learned darkness or fear.

The final version of the heart believes in possibility because it survived what tried to destroy it.

It also understands that survival is not the same as healing.

Healing does not erase the pain or make it as though it never happened.

The heart carries every stage that came before it.

The darkness was fought against for long enough and hard enough that the heart learned something it did not know before:

Darkness can exist without being allowed to own everything.

The heart begins to live more deeply and more colorfully.

The flowers open again.

The thorns that remain are woven into the landscape by deliberate design. They are not hidden or denied, but they are no longer allowed to decide what grows there.

That is the difference.

Before, life simply happened around the heart.

Now the heart chooses.

What it protects.

What it allows near it.

What it feeds.

What it lets grow.

The darkness did not disappear.

Neither did the memories.

They became part of the landscape instead of the entire horizon.

The heart is no longer melting.

It has found its shape again.

Not the same shape.

Its own shape.

The shape it created after discovering that healing was never going to mean becoming the person who existed before the battlefield.

Growth comes from knowing that the past does not have to be exposed for everything to see, nor does it have to be hidden away as though it never existed.

The past becomes knowledge.

And that knowledge gives hope something it never possessed before:

Information.

The heart now knows there will always be darkness somewhere in the world.

It knows safety can disappear quickly.

So the heart guards itself differently now.

It remembers grief.

Fear.

Numbness.

Complete emptiness.

It does not have the ability to forget what those things felt like.

Yet it still chooses to believe there can be something beautiful ahead.

It fights for growth.

It learns again that there is a world of possibilities.

But because of everything it has been through, it understands something the first heart never had to understand:

Possibility is no longer assumed.

It has to be chosen.

The heart cannot erase the devastation the mind endured during its fight on the battlefield.

But it can allow itself to grow beyond it.

It no longer hides its broken pieces from the world.

It wears them as evidence that it survived.

The scars do not have to be discarded or covered because harm is not something that simply disappears when it is locked away.

Given the right light, the right sun, and the right direction, even the places shaped by pain can become part of something living.

The heart gets to decide what remains.

Some thorns become boundaries.

Some are no longer given space.

Some of what once represented pain becomes evidence of growth.

And none of it has to be carried with shame.

The broken pieces are not proof that the heart became less beautiful.

They became part of something far more beautiful than it ever imagined it could become.

This is why the heart allows flowers to grow again.

Because this time, it wants them there.

The flowers are not accidental.

Neither is the light.

They are chosen.

The heart allows the mind to build around the thorns without pretending they never existed.

It decides which ones remain as boundaries and which ones no longer deserve space.

The flowers grow because they are wanted there.

The light exists because the heart fought long enough to find it again.

This heart is not evidence that I returned to who I was.

It is evidence that I became someone I could not have imagined before.

Not untouched.

Not without scars.

Not without darkness.

But alive.

Aware.

Choosing.

Growing.

Becoming mine.

Maybe that is why there had to be six.

One heart could have shown pain.

One heart could have shown recovery.

But one heart could never have shown the entire war.

The innocence.

The warning.

The collapse.

The disappearance.

The return.

The becoming.

For so long, I looked at what happened to me as evidence that something inside me was defective.

I saw the panic.

The anger.

The confusion.

The exhaustion.

The hypervigilance.

The pieces of myself I could no longer reach.

And I blamed the heart for what had wrapped itself around it.

But I am not the villain of this story.

I am not the darkness.

I am not the thorns.

I am the heart that remained beneath them.

And I am still becoming.

The Strength We Hide

There is something deeply human about the way we hide our suffering.

It is not vanity. It is not pride. It is fear. Ancient and instinctive. The fear that if others see how much we are hurting, they will decide we are no longer worthy of standing where we once stood. That our pain disqualifies us. That our suffering is evidence of weakness rather than survival.

So we learn to tuck it away. We learn to smile carefully. We learn which parts of ourselves are acceptable to show and which parts must remain hidden, even in the moments when we need connection the most. Suffering becomes private not because it is shameful, but because the world has taught us that pain invites judgment.

And judgment isolates.

As I began my healing journey, still very early, incredibly fragile, somewhere in the first steps of learning how to live inside my own mind again. After the chaos and harm of the past few years of torment and self judgement; I found myself reaching outward. Not widely. Carefully. Toward the people who had reached for me before, even briefly. A call here. A text there. Small gestures that carried enormous weight.

One person, in particular, kept returning to my thoughts.

I had known her for nearly a quarter of a century, a lifetime by many measures. I could remember the first inspection we ever did together. I was still green, still learning, and she was brand new. Back then, even if you were fresh at your job, you taught the next person who walked through the door. We walked into a restaurant so infested with cockroaches that when you pulled the paper towels from the dispenser, the roaches came spilling out with them.

It was horrific.

And yet, it was also a place of happiness for her. It was where she had gone after getting engaged to the man who would become her lifelong partner. Someone who would stand beside her through everything that came after. I remember thinking, even then, that she had found something rare. I never envied her for it, but I noticed it. I admired it. I always had.

Over the decades, she became woven into the fabric of my life. She came to my wedding. She arrived as a brand-new mother of her second child, carrying that soft, luminous exhaustion that only new mothers have. I still remember how her face glowed illuminating beauty. A lot of pride and exhaustion all wrapped into one. Her smile carried warmth, happiness into the room. I remember how deeply it mattered to me that she was there, standing beside me in that moment of my life. Not out of obligation, but because she chose it. I realized presence is its own form of loyalty.

After that, she came to my son’s first birthday.

It was one of those ordinary milestones that doesn’t feel ordinary when you look back—balloons, laughter, the chaos of a one-year-old discovering the world. And there she was again. Showing up. Witnessing. Standing inside the small, meaningful moments that quietly build a life.

Those memories stayed with me.

And then, at one point in her life, she became ill.

Cancer.

The word itself carries judgment, whether we admit it or not. The world looked at her differently—not because of who she was or what she had built, but because she had been sick. People quietly decided she was no longer capable. No longer reliable. No longer the same.

Watching that happen to her impacted me. And now, as I look back, I realize she probably understood what I am going through now more than almost anyone else ever could.

Because I, too, have been judged not by my competence or my history, but by my pain. I have been treated as though being hurt means being diminished. As though suffering cancels out worth. And when institutions reinforce that lie, the trauma mind absorbs it. Begins to believe it. Begins to whisper that maybe they are right.

—Still, even during my darkest years, the years I wanted to give up and give the world a pass and just let the darkness absorb me, even when I couldn’t see in myself what I outwardly carried, she would tell me she envied my strength.

Strength, in my world, has never been abstract. I have a daughter with diabetes, and I have raised a son who taught me that every child asks something different of their mother. It required different patience, different advocacy, different ways of staying steady when life gets hard.

A diabetic child is a whole different layer of trauma and fear. It was measured in blood sugar checks and sleepless nights, in vigilance that never turns off, in learning how to stay calm when your child’s life depends on your steadiness. My friend saw that. She named it in words that have never left me., “They say God doesn’t give you more than you can handle, but sometimes I’m not sure what God’s plan was for you.“

She didn’t say it lightly. She didn’t say it cruelly. She said it with awe. With concern. With the quiet recognition that what I had been asked to carry was heavy—perhaps heavier than anyone should have to bear.

At the time, I didn’t know how to receive that. Trauma has a way of convincing you that endurance is not strength, just obligation. That surviving does not count if you are exhausted while doing it.

Something in me kept thinking of her. It was the same quiet, persistent pull I’ve felt my whole life. A mental pull, the one my grandmother, Rose used to talk about. She would call one of her children or grandchildren by the wrong name, then laugh and say, “They must be thinking of me” And most of the time, she was right. Someone would call. Someone would show up. Time and distance would collapse into closeness.

I think I inherited that from her. That empathetic sixth sense. The feeling in the pit of my stomach when someone’s name won’t let go.

So I reached out.

She is a cancer survivor, nearly ten years strong. But survival does not always erase the fear. The possibility of its return can linger quietly in the back of the mind, creating its own kind of darkness. Doubt. Questions about value. Questions about the future. Questions about whether the world might once again reduce a person to a diagnosis.

I want to stand beside her.

Because her illness never diminished her worth. It shook her confidence. It challenged her sense of self. But it did not erase the truth of who she is deep inside; a remarkable mother, a devoted partner, a capable leader, a woman who built something extraordinary even when fear told her she might lose everything.

During the recession, she worried she wouldn’t be able to feed her family. Later, she and her husband built an empire. An empire she still doesn’t fully recognize as evidence of her own strength. Suffering has a way of blinding us to our greatness. It teaches us to fixate on the fractures and ignore the structure still standing.

And here I am still isolated, still crying, unable to put up my Christmas decorations because I don’t yet know how to feel joy again. I don’t know how to live the way I once did. But I want joy for her. I want peace for her. I want her to see what I see.

I want her to know that what the world calls kryptonite was never weakness at all.

Trauma does not require a single violent incident to nearly destroy us. It can come from prolonged judgment. From betrayal by systems we trusted. From having our identities questioned and our value reduced to what we can produce rather than who we are.

A lawsuit can be trauma.
An institution turning against you can be trauma.
Having your faith in yourself put on trial can be trauma.

Kindness, then, becomes resistance.

Standing beside someone and saying, I see you. I know your strength. You are still worthy, is not softness. It is defiance against a world that confuses suffering with failure.

Watching my friend continue to fight, continue to live, to build, to love someone who internally feels so unlovable as me, helps inch me closer to remembering the life I once had. The strength I outwardly showed the world that I couldn’t internally allow myself to feel. It allows joy to return slowly, alongside the pain, rather than being consumed by it.

And maybe that is how healing works.

Not all at once.
Not loudly.

But through remembering one another.

Through refusing to let suffering be the final word.

Through choosing to see strength where the world looks away.

By building strength in those around us, by remembering that everyone is fighting an internal battle, and by rolling up our own sleeves to help the person beside us, that strength may become bright enough to light the way.