You grow up watching the relationship between your parents, idealizing them & gravitating towards similar partners. Somehow, you don't know the difference between healthy & unhealthy until you're exposed to something different.

You've only ever known the interaction between the insatiable giver & taker. You grow older, & by then, so many traits have been deeply normalized & accepted. You find yourself overlooking emotional unavailability, emotional blackmail or unhealthy levels of codependency.

You mistaken that for love. Oh how deeply you fall into the ditch when you mistaken that for love. Isn't it though? It's what you've learnt to be ’normal’. You allow others to dictate your actions & your emotional responses are wrapped tightly around the actions of others.

Then you find yourself in your twenties, deeply conflicted about all that you've learned & how different it is from what you've been brought up with. You find yourself unlearning every toxic trait because you’ve got a glimpse of what healthy looks like.

Soon, you'll have a family of your own, & you'll question what traits you'll take into your new relationships.

You know what you have to do to save a future generation from having to heal from what you could have passed down to them, all because it was deemed ’normal’.

It took you 20 years to know the difference between healthy & unhealthy. 20 years of absorbing & learning only to unlearn everything & start over from scratch. You learn that healing is intentional, & sometimes you have to choose to be better, for yourself.

What we deem ’normal’ is subjective. Our parents, in many cases are the products of their upbringing, they’re unaware of how impactful their behaviour is on their children. & while your childhood may have been traumatic, you don't have to center your identity around it.

Validate yourself, then choose better for yourself. Go through the levels of cognitive dissonance, & overcome it. Choose to break those generational curses, because you owe it to yourself & the generations to come.