We all have stories—
some passed down,
some passed around,
some born from glances never explained.

I’ve learned that the same story can be told a hundred different ways depending on who holds the pen. One person remembers the way the light hit the kitchen table. Another remembers the silence after a slammed door. Some recall laughter. Some can’t forget the ache. And none of it makes any of it less real.

What’s hardest is when the stories begin to live lives of their own—shaped by whispers, fueled by wounds, rewritten by those who need a version that comforts their pain.

Sometimes love is rewritten into betrayal,
connection into threat,
guidance into control.
And suddenly, you find yourself a villain in a story you never wrote.

There is a kind of grief—no, not grief, but a reckoning—
when a child is no longer allowed to speak to you.
Not because of something you did,
but because someone else needed them to stop listening.

Needed them to carry their pain,
to make sense of their own wounds by silencing yours.
And so, a legacy is broken, not by truth,
but by the stories others told loud enough, long enough,
that it began to sound like history.

And yet…

There are other children,
other souls
who are spared the chaos,
who find family in love,
who are given the gift of choosing their path—not out of fear or pressure,
but through the soft unfolding of experience.
They come to know love not as a tool or a transaction,
but as a presence.

That is the hope.
That is the beauty in this brokenness.

Because we cannot fix the feelings others are determined to carry.
We cannot rewrite their chapters.
But we can stop reading the story aloud to ourselves.

We can sit with it—not to suffer it, but to let it soften.
To breathe it in only long enough to find the lesson,
and then breathe it out
as something lighter.

This is how we stop the inheritance of pain.
This is how we leave space for joy,
even if some never return.

We do not need to resent them.
We do not need to chase them.
We simply need to be here—fully here—
with all the love that remains.

The past is not ours to fix.
But the present…
the present is ours to live.

Let the story pass.
Let the breath deepen.
Let the legacy of love be louder than the lie.

-Kerri-Elizabeth-