I grew up being told who I needed to be.
My mum said it once, plainly we come from a disadvantaged family. As the firstborn, my role was clear. Be a good daughter. Be a good sister. Stay honest and humble. Make no mistakes.
So I did.
I carried that quietly for years. Smiling at relatives who looked through me as if I was invisible. Staying connected to people who blamed me first, questioned me always and celebrated me never. I showed up every family gatherings, festive seasons, milestone moments hoping that perhaps this time, things would feel different. They never did.
Their impression of me was fixed. Uneducated, Scheming and Untalented. Words that were never said to my face but somehow always found their way back to me. No one asked who I really was. I was a conclusion they reached without ever knowing the full story.
And the most painful part? I kept showing up anyway for my mum. Hoping to be seen. Hoping to be proven wrong. Hoping that one day, someone in that room would say: “I see you.” And you are more than what they say.
That day never came.
So I smiled. And I carried it quietly, for many years.
The hardest part? The impression I left on others was never really mine, not for who I was, but for whose daughter I happened to be.
It was built on gossip. On assumptions passed around like facts. On those carefree housewives who never asked, never checked, never gave me the chance to speak for myself. Yet somehow, they all had an opinion. As if they are living with me everyday and they even knew me better than I knew myself.
Nobody questioned it. The whole story was narrated in their liking and passed on without a single thought of the damage it left behind.
It just… stuck.
I started carrying their labels for decades. Quietly dragging the weight of who they decided I was, yet…… not who I actually am.
That’s the cruelest kind of burden. One you never agreed to carry.
My mum wanted to stay close to her family. I understood why. After leaving my dad, she needed to belong somewhere. I respected that. But it meant I had to keep showing up for people who had already decided I wasn’t worth much.
I did it for her anyway.
As the years passed, I noticed something shift. When mistakes were made by others, they were quickly forgiven and moved on easily, never brought up again. Yet mine remained. The stories they made up for me casually brought up constantly over their afternoon tea.
The relationships that never once felt warm became… surface. The people you thought might truly see you, slowly, quietly and stopped showing up. Then one day you look around and wonder:
Who am I, outside of all of this?
Not the firstborn. Not the blamed one. Not my father’s shadow.
Just… me.
That question took me so long to ask.
And maybe I’m here because something in me is quietly asking it too.
If so, let this be the moment I give myself permission.
Permission to stop carrying what was never mine. Permission to question the story they wrote about me. Permission to finally start writing my own experiences.
I am not their words. I am not their assumptions. I am definitely not who they needed me to be.
I am still here. And that means it’s not too late.