THE THINGS WE SURVIVE CAN BECOME THE THINGS WE DO TO OTHERS

Odysseus by Ludwig Goransson

I think I need to be more honest with myself.

I don’t really know how to deal with pain.

Grief, disappointment, hurt I usually just “na man you be” my way through it and keep moving.

And for a long time, I thought that was strength.

But lately I’ve been wondering if the things we refuse to process don’t actually disappear. Maybe they just find another way out.

Sometimes in how we speak to people.
Sometimes in how little patience we have for their struggles.
Sometimes in the standards we expect everyone else to meet simply because we once had to meet them too.

And I think this might be where some toxic behavior begins.

Not always from someone waking up and deciding to be a terrible person, but sometimes from someone who endured so much that endurance became their normal.

“My own was worse, and I survived.”

“Nobody gave me time.”

“Nobody cared when I was struggling.”

“So why should this be different for you?”

I work in a very fast-paced software environment, and one thing that made me think about this more deeply is my manager.

Sometimes she expects things to happen in what feels like record time. When I explain that something realistically cannot be done within that timeframe, I sometimes feel like I’m being seen as pessimistic rather than practical.

It would be very easy to stop there and simply call her toxic.

Maybe some of the behavior is.

But when I’ve spoken to her outside the immediate pressure of work, I’ve sometimes found myself thinking that she might also just be a product of the same kind of system.

Maybe somebody expected the impossible from her for years.

Maybe urgency became normal.

Maybe being overwhelmed was never considered a valid reason to slow down.

And eventually, what was done to you becomes what you expect from everybody else.

That thought scared me a little because I can see smaller versions of it in myself too.

There are moments when someone is going through something and my first instinct is almost, “You’ll be fine. Just push through.”

Because that is what I learned to tell myself.

But surviving something does not automatically make the way you survived it healthy.

And being able to endure pain does not mean everyone around you should have to endure theirs in silence too.

I don’t want my unprocessed experiences to become somebody else’s difficult experience of me.

I don’t want the things that hardened me to become the reason I am hard on other people.

I know self-awareness is only the beginning.

But I genuinely want to become a better human being to the people around me.

Maybe part of that is learning that strength is not only about how much pain you can carry.

Sometimes it is about making sure your pain doesn’t become someone else’s burden.