A Personal Story About The Protector Parts I Built and Exiled
I was small. Not the kind of small that gets overlooked. The kind that gets targeted.
Junior high was where it started. At school, I was being bullied. At home, something quieter but just as damaging was happening. I had no power in either place. No voice that anyone seemed to hear. No size that commanded respect. What I did have was a mind that moved fast and a mouth that could match it.
So the dragon formed.
It was not a conscious decision. It never is. The part of you that learns to survive does not ask permission. It finds what is available and sharpens it. For me, that was words. Sharp, precise, capable of drawing blood from across a room. I was never the biggest person in any space, but I learned early that I did not need to be. Fire comes from the mouth.
By high school, the dragon was fully alive. And I will be honest about what that looked like, because softening it would miss the point entirely. I became the bully. The thing that had hurt me, I became it. Not out of cruelty, though the results were cruel. Out of a desperate need to feel something I had never had: power. Control. The illusion of being untouchable.
From the inside, it felt like strength. I thought I was projecting invincibility. What I did not yet understand was that the dragon was not strength. It was armor with teeth. It did not distinguish between a genuine threat and a Tuesday afternoon. That was my nervous system running the show. It had learned to stay activated, and it rarely, if ever, rested. The collateral damage was real.
By the time I finished high school, I could see myself clearly enough to feel the shame of it. The pride curdled. I saw what I had been doing and I knew, without anyone having to tell me, that I could not keep living inside that identity. This was my second intentional shift, the first conscious decision I made about who I wanted to become.
So I exiled the dragon.
I buried the fire. I smoothed the edges. I worked hard to become someone who would not cause that kind of harm again. And in many ways it worked. But exile is not integration. A part that goes underground does not disappear. It waits.
I spent years doing the work I knew how to do. Books. Retreats. Affirmations. Visualization. I was sincere about all of it. I made real progress. But there was always this feeling, this persistent, exhausting feeling, that I was standing at the edge of something much larger that I could not quite reach. I would get close and then slide back. Try again. Get close. Slide back.
For years, I lived on that precipice.
The loneliness of it was something I rarely spoke about. Most nights it was just me, my practice, and a dog who witnessed more tears than I could count. She had seen all of it. The longing. The frustration. The quiet grief of doing everything right and still feeling like something essential was missing.
When she began her transition out of this life, something shifted. She had been my companion for ten years. The presence that had grounded me through every tear, every practice, every quiet night was leaving. And with her, the last thing holding me in place.
The fear of being alone in the house where we had built so many memories was something I could not sit with. But underneath the fear was something else. A promise. Not to try harder. I had been trying. Not to seek more. I had been seeking. The promise was simpler and harder than either of those: I would commit to the path in earnest. No more sampling. No more sliding back. I would go in search of healing, of community, of the life I had been dreaming of.
I did not know what I was about to find waiting for me.
Part two, The Insight Years: How I Stopped Running From Myself, publishes April 14.
