What Survives the Pruning
Strength was never loud in my life.
It did not arrive as confidence.
It did not look like certainty.
It grew quietly
while I was being cut.
I was six months old when I was sent to live with my grandparents.
Until I was seven, I did not grow up with my parents.
I grew up between homes.
Between expectations.
Between identities that were constantly corrected.
When I stayed with one side of the family,
I was told I was becoming too much like the other.
When I returned,
I was told I had changed again.
Habits were trimmed.
Tone was corrected.
Expressions adjusted.
I was like a plant
that two gardeners kept pruning —
not to help it grow,
but to remove what reminded them of each other.
No one asked who I was becoming.
They only removed what they did not accept.
I did not fear leaving.
I had been moved too many times to fear that.
What I was seeking was not permission to stay.
It was acceptance.
Acceptance of who I already was —
without scissors.
Without reshaping.
Without dividing me into acceptable and unacceptable parts.
Strength, in those years,
did not look like power.
It looked like surviving quietly.
It looked like observing.
Adapting.
Enduring.
And somewhere beneath all the trimming,
something remained untouched.
The Blind Spots
When you grow up without full acceptance,
you learn to earn it.
You become careful.
Helpful.
Over-giving.
Not because you are weak.
But because you are searching
to be seen whole.
I entered adulthood believing in people.
Believing in fairness.
When my father passed and I received an inheritance,
opportunities — and opportunists — arrived together.
Contracts were signed in trust.
Payments were made in good faith.
Deliveries were delayed.
Promises shifted.
Accountability blurred.
I paid.
They did not deliver.
What hurt most was not the loss.
It was the shame.
Why did I trust?
Why didn’t I see?
Why was I so easy to misread?
For a time,
I hated the world.
Not once.
More than once.
I hated the small calculations hidden in smiles.
The manipulation disguised as opportunity.
But later I understood something more honest.
I did not hate because I loved deeply.
I hated because I loved idealistically.
I believed in a world where goodness would be met with goodness.
Where sincerity would be mirrored.
Where love, once given, would return intact.
It was a beautiful belief.
But it was incomplete.
I had not yet learned to love without projection.
I had not yet learned to see clearly.
When an ideal breaks,
the fracture feels like betrayal.
And when expectations collapse,
the emotion that follows can feel like hate.
But that hate was not darkness.
It was disillusionment.
It was the shattering of a fantasy
that the world would respond
according to the purity of my intention.
I had loved a version of the world
that did not exist.
And when reality refused to comply,
I mistook disappointment for hatred.
Weakness Revisited
What if weakness
is simply strength before awareness?
When you are called too sensitive,
it may mean you feel deeply.
When you are told you are too soft,
it may mean you chose not to let your wounds turn you cold.
Some people grow armor after being hurt.
I learned to tend to my wounds in private
and still face the world without bitterness.
Not because I was untouched,
but because I refused to let pain redefine me.
Softness is not the opposite of strength.
Unawareness is.
The lion was never my enemy.
My blind spots were.
They saw what I had not yet seen.
And life used them to show it to me.
Every betrayal revealed something I had not yet claimed:
My need to be needed.
My hunger to prove worth through giving.
My fear of not being fully accepted.
Pain repeated until I paid attention.
And once I saw clearly,
I did not become harder.
I became clearer.
Now I can see intention in a sentence.
Calculation in a pause.
But I do not hate.
Because I understand.
Most people act from their own unhealed places.
Just as I once did.
The Unshaken Field
I grew up around temples.
Around incense smoke and chanting.
Around scriptures copied by hand
before I fully understood their depth.
As a child, I absorbed them without filters.
Years later, during meditation,
a vision came.
I saw a vast golden Buddha.
Not as an idol,
but as a field of unwavering presence.
Light radiated constantly.
Unchanging.
Steady.
It did not brighten when praised.
It did not dim when insulted.
Whether flowers were offered
or dust was thrown,
whether devotion was given
or ridicule cast —
everything that entered His field
transformed.
A sword became a lotus petal.
Harshness softened.
Violence dissolved.
The lesson was silent:
True strength does not retaliate.
It transmutes.
It remains so rooted in compassion
that nothing retains its sharpness
once it enters.
To be unshaken
is not to be numb.
It is to be so anchored in love
that even what was meant to wound you
returns softened.
That is the strength I am still learning.
