“I release.”

I never really understood that statement. And sometimes, I feel like I still don’t.

But let’s go back.

When I was 21, my college roommate encouraged me to apply to speak at a women’s empowerment event. I had escaped an abusive household, moved states away on my own, and was learning how to live in a world I had spent most of my life sheltered from.

Unfortunately, if I’m being completely transparent, I don’t remember much from that period of my life. A lot of it comes back to me in pieces.

But I remember writing that application.

I was terrified of rejection. I had always been someone who stayed in the shadows, so putting my story in front of strangers felt terrifying. Still, part of me thought, Surely my story will get me in.

I had escaped a home I once thought I would never be able to leave.

On the night of my high school graduation, I remember staring down the barrel of my mother’s husband’s gun while he told me I wasn’t allowed to leave.

I told him, “I’d rather you kill me now than know I’ll be in this household any longer.”

And I left.

I grew up without much freedom. Even reading was something I sometimes had to sneak around to do because he didn’t like the idea of me knowing too much. Truthfully, sometimes I think that if he had known how to homeschool me, he would have kept me from the outside world completely.

So at 21, I thought surviving all of that made my story powerful enough.

Then I received the rejection.

I remember looking at that letter and thinking, Maybe my life isn’t worth anything.

It took me years to understand what I couldn’t understand then.

I had written my story through the eyes of someone who was still living inside her pain.

I wrote as a victim, not yet as a survivor.

And there is nothing wrong with that.

I was 21. I was recovering from years of abuse, isolation, and control. I had physically left, but I was only beginning to understand what had happened to me. Suddenly, I was expected to exist in a world I had barely been allowed to experience.

How could I possibly have wrapped all of that pain into a beautiful story about empowerment?

I couldn’t.

I hadn’t reached that part of my story yet.

Years later, I found myself sitting in front of another application.

This time, it was for grad school.

Once again, I had to go backward. I had to look at experiences I had spent years trying to move beyond and explain how they led me to this moment.

But something was different this time.

I wasn’t writing to prove that what happened to me was bad enough.

I was writing about what I had done afterward.

And somewhere between the 21-year-old writing desperately about what she survived and the woman sitting in front of a graduate school application years later, I finally started to understand those two words:

I release.

I release the belief that I am doomed to repeat my parents’ mistakes.

I release the belief that because I grew up surrounded by unhealthy love, I will only choose unhealthy love for myself.

I release the belief that I cannot create a successful career because I never had anyone before me to show me the way.

I release the belief that I have to please everyone around me to keep myself safe.

I release the belief that saying no will make people leave.

I release the belief that I have to make myself smaller so other people can feel bigger.

I release the belief that I need permission to take up space.

I release the belief that my past is a prediction of my future.

Maybe that is what I misunderstood about the words “I release.”

I cannot change the fact that these things happened to me. I cannot change the fact that I didn’t experience a normal childhood. I cannot go back and give that little girl the safety, freedom, or love she deserved.

But I can give myself the future I dreamed about.

I can give my inner child the safe love she always wanted. I can build a home where I don’t have to make myself small. I can create a career even though no one before me showed me how. And one day, if I have children, I can give them the kind of childhood I once wished for myself.

Because the power is mine now.

And maybe that’s the part of healing I didn’t understand before.

Healing doesn’t mean I don’t still get sad sometimes. It doesn’t mean I don’t feel hurt when I think about the things I never got to experience that seemed so normal for my friends.

Sometimes, I am jealous.

When I moved out, I had to depend on myself in ways I watched other people depend on their parents. There are still moments when I see someone call their parents for help, go home when life gets hard, or have someone there to guide them, and I wonder what it would have felt like to have that too.

Releasing my past doesn’t mean pretending those feelings don’t exist.

The difference is that now, I get to decide what I do with them.

I can acknowledge the sadness without letting it consume me. I can feel jealous without deciding that makes me a bad person. I can grieve what I didn’t have without allowing that grief to convince me that I can never have something better.

Those feelings are valid.

But they are not the whole story.

They don’t get to label me as a victim forever. They don’t get to decide the relationships I choose, the career I build, the home I create, or the person I become.

I can hold space for the little girl who was an innocent bystander to other people’s harmful choices while still becoming the woman who gets to make her own.

Maybe that’s what “I release” means to me now.

Not forgetting.

Not pretending it didn’t hurt.

Not forcing myself to forgive before I’m ready.

Not pleasing others just to avoid upsetting them.

It means accepting that I cannot rewrite what happened to me. I cannot change the choices other people made.

But I can release the belief that their choices have to become mine.

What happened before was not within my control.

What I do next is.

And now, I have the power and the freedom to choose.