Up until high school, I was terrified of people. Not shy in the cute way adults call a kid “shy.” Terrified. If an adult I didn’t know spoke to me, I couldn’t answer without tears. Didn’t matter if the situation was good or bad. My body decided I was in danger and it acted like it. I don’t know how much of that came from what was happening in my parents’ marriage, or from being raised by silent generation parents who didn’t ask children what they thought about anything. I just know that’s how I was wired, and nobody around me was equipped to un-wire it.
By middle school, I was having what I called my mini-breakdowns, on the floor of my bathroom, praying. Not decorative praying. Begging God to get me out of my own life. Nobody was listening to me. Nobody cared what I thought, and people spoke for me constantly, decided what I felt and what I meant, never in my favor. I had a high IQ, offers to skip grades, all the markers adults use to decide a kid is fine. None of it fixed the fact that I had no agency. I could not open my mouth and correct an adult who had it wrong about me. I felt as if every time I opened my mouth, someone had their hand in my back like I was a talking puppet. That kind of powerlessness does something to a kid that grades can’t touch.
I was eleven when I told my mother she needed to divorce my father. I had a speech prepared and memorized. I was shaking. I was crying while I said it, but I said it anyway, and I told her if she didn’t, I was moving in with my godmother. That was the first time in my life I handled real conflict instead of disappearing from it. I went back into the bathroom afterward and prayed again, asking God to make me stronger, to let me speak for myself so people would stop borrowing my voice. She filed for divorce within two weeks. She let me know she’d been staying in it for my sister and me, and I told her what that house had done to me was worse than whatever she thought she was protecting by staying. I didn’t give her details. I didn’t need to. She heard something in me that scared her enough to act.
Within months we had our own home, and something shifted that mattered more than the move itself. My mother started asking me what I thought about things. Small things, at first. How I wanted the curtains to look. What I thought we should do about this or that decision in the new house. We didn’t have a word for it back then, and we weren’t in therapy, nobody did that in my family in those days, but she was an elementary school teacher who’d spent a career being more psychologist than educator in an inner-city school system, and she recognized a kid in danger when she saw one. She built me a place to practice having an opinion on something that didn’t matter, so I’d have the muscle for when something did.
By thirteen, walking into high school, the bathroom breakdowns were happening less. The weight in my chest that never fully let up was quieter. I made a decision, and I didn’t just decide it once and move on. I prayed on it, and I pictured it, over and over, the version of me who could walk into a room and not fall apart. Brave. Able to talk to adults without shaking. Able to say what I thought and still be respectful about it. I built her in my head before I ever became her, prayer and imagination working the same muscle, and I kept projecting that image of myself until she started to feel more real than the girl who used to hit the bathroom floor. And it worked. I became her. High school was normal. Good, even.
Here’s the part that took me decades to understand fully. That reinvention was real. I was not faking a person who didn’t exist. I was surviving alone, with no therapist, no language for any of it, just prayer and sheer will, and I built a version of myself that was actually mine, not a costume. But I also learned, the same way my mother had, how to tuck the seams in so nobody could see what still lived underneath. Both things were true at once. I had genuinely become braver. And the trauma response was still running in the basement the whole time, just quieter, just better hidden, because I’d never gotten the chance to actually heal it. I’d only gotten strong enough to outrun it for a while.
None of this happened in a vacuum. Every school I ever attended, kindergarten through college, was predominantly white. So the pressure to be exceptional never had a single break in it, not at home, not in the classroom, not anywhere I existed. Black girls get told, one way or another, from about the time we can talk, that we are the exception. The responsible one. The one who is going to make it, so we better act like it. Researchers at Georgetown found what they call adultification bias, that adults see Black girls as less innocent than white girls starting as young as five, more grown, more able to handle themselves, less in need of comfort or protection. Nobody hands you a research paper when you’re eleven crying on a bathroom floor. But you feel the exact moment somebody decides your pain does not require the same softness a white child’s would get. That was mine. That is most of ours.
So, we learn the shift. Not the corporate kind. The deeper kind, the one that starts in childhood, where you package your pain so other people stay comfortable enough to remain in the room with you. Present. Palatable. Exceptional. One of the good ones. Never too loud, too sad, too much. I did that shift before I ever had a word for it, and I got so good at it that most of the adults raising me had no real idea what was happening underneath the performance. That’s not resilience. That’s a survival skill wearing a trophy that says strength on it.
That wears on a person in ways that don’t announce themselves right away. You walk into every room already performing composed and competent before anyone even asks you to. Not just the boardroom. Your own family. Your friendships. Your relationships. You’re expected to be the one who has it together, the one setting the bar everybody else gets measured against, while nobody sets that same bar for the people who get to just show up as they are. Carry that long enough and it doesn’t arrive as a breakdown. It starts as fissures. A short temper you don’t recognize in yourself. A bitterness that creeps in when nobody says thank you for the thing you’ve been carrying quietly for years. A loneliness that sits right next to a full calendar and a phone full of people who think they know you. Then one day the fissures aren’t small anymore, and it isn’t a bad week, it’s a crisis, and you’re the last person anybody expected to see fall apart, including yourself.
That held together right up until it didn’t. I got a full scholarship for college during my junior year in high school and, after graduation, started college that was six hours from home, and the whole structure I’d built collapsed. The chest pains that kept me in bed. Anxiety I could not manage or hide anymore. Too much pressure to be the one who succeeded, too many people in my family who expected me to be exceptional, and I was so far from fine I couldn’t fake it through a semester. That’s what put me in a therapist’s office for the first time, at eighteen.
Nobody warns you what imposter syndrome feels like when it’s sitting on top of trauma that’s been running since childhood. It’s not just doubting your work. It’s doubting whether the person doing the work is even real. You become a proxy for yourself, walking around answering to your own name, holding a job, holding relationships, while the actual you sits somewhere underneath, watching a performance she didn’t fully agree to. People fall in love with the proxy. They promote the proxy. They lean on the proxy in a crisis and tell her how wonderful she is. And you start to resent her a little, if I’m being honest, this version of you that gets all the credit while the real one is exhausted and scared and still eleven years old on a bathroom floor somewhere. You resent the parts of yourself that had to build her in the first place, the softness that got buried to make room for her, the fear that never got a name, the little girl who just wanted somebody to ask if she was okay instead of praising her for holding it together. I’ve had bad therapists in the years since, the white women who listened to my life like it was a story I was telling for entertainment and offered nothing back. I’ve had good Black female therapists who pushed me somewhere uncomfortable enough to actually move something. I’m still in it. Still working, now exclusively with Black, female therapists. They carry an intrinsic knowledge of how our culture as Black Americans has weighed on our psyche that nobody else can bring into the room.
What I know now is that I spent decades being needed by everyone else before I could get back to needing myself. Single mom to my daughter. Then my own mother, and our complicated relationship, and her dementia, and everything that required of me. I’m in my fifties now, and this is the first stretch of my life where working on myself isn’t the thing that happens after everyone else’s needs are handled. It’s the only thing I’m focusing on. That shift is its own kind of freedom- one nobody warns you about. Turning the attention inward, after a lifetime of studying everybody else’s needs like it was my job, has been enlightening in ways I didn’t expect. It builds a muscle you didn’t know you needed, the one that lets you finally set down the guilt of minding somebody else’s business and mind your own instead.
Somewhere in my thirties, I finally went looking for her, the actual little girl, not the reinvention, not the proxy, not the responsible one who made everybody comfortable. I found her still on that bathroom floor, still eleven years old, still waiting for somebody to tell her she didn’t have to handle everything alone. I couldn’t keep outrunning her. I had to turn around, sit down on that floor with her, and finally let somebody help both of us. That took more courage than the speech I gave my mother at eleven, more than college, more than any room I ever walked into pretending to have it together. Asking for help when you’ve spent a lifetime being the one everyone else leans on is its own kind of reinvention, maybe the only one that counts. I’m still doing it. I don’t know if I’ll ever be finished. But I know her now. I see her. And I am not leaving her on that floor by herself again.
Did you have to reinvent yourself as a kid just to survive, and are you still doing the real work of becoming whole now? Tell me in the comments.