We aren’t just born; we are downloaded.
By the time you’re old enough to realize you have a choice, your mental filing cabinet is already stuffed with folders you didn’t create. They are the “Inherited Files”—the fears of your mother, the silences of your grandmother, the survival tactics of ancestors you never even met.
The Ghost in the Folder
We call it personality. We call it “just the way I am.” But usually, it’s just conditioning on a loop. Maybe your “File on Success” is actually a file on not being seen, because being seen was dangerous for the women who came before you. Maybe your “File on Love” is actually a file on sacrifice, because you were taught that to be a woman is to be a martyr.
This isn’t just “social stress.” It’s a haunting. And the grit of the work is realizing that you are the one holding the keys to the cabinet. You are the one who has to decide which of these folders are survival tools and which ones are just dead weight.
The Act of Rebellion
Unpacking this isn’t a “soft” journey. It’s a messy, violent extraction of the things that don’t belong to you. It means looking at the people you love and saying, “I’m not carrying this for you anymore.”
My upcoming work is about that extraction. It’s about the raw, juicy reality of what’s left of a person when you strip away the generational weight. It’s not always pretty, but for the first time, it’s mine.