Silence to grow...

There is a question that we rarely ask ourselves as parents and that is: what am I teaching my child when he makes a mistake? Not with the words, but with the face you put on, with the tone you use when something didn't go as you expected, with your attitude to what happened.

Because children don't learn to relate to failure by listening to what we tell them. They learn it by observing how we react when things go wrong.

In fact, there are adults who today procrastinate, who abandon any project, activity, task, before trying something, who are terribly afraid of looking bad, and when one goes to the bottom of that, there almost always appears a child who learned very early that the mistake was not just a mistake. It was disappointing someone he loved, and the consequence of that was to be left without his love.

I talked about that emptiness that is charged when you grow up with an absent father or mother, and what a person, decides to do with that, throughout his life. Look, there are those who live looking outside, in other people, for that figure that they lacked. And there are those who at some point understand that true security is built inside.

Sometimes certain sufferings make things that had become normal transparent to us... and strange as it may sound... they even make us regain our sanity, whether out of curiosity, out of the need to understand everything, our ability to walk alone through the world, and build from there a version that stands on its own.

My reflection is that there are absences that can break a person. And there are people who are built, precisely, from that absence, because it is a way of standing up to life, even in the face of the uncertainty that absence leaves us, and there are also people who learned to know their value only through the eyes of others. Because when someone grows up in a system where love and approval came conditioned to performance, where others decided if what you did was enough or not, the result is almost always the same: an adult who knows how to demand himself but does not know how to love himself, who knows how to find his flaws but not his achievements, who looks for confirmation in others that he never learned to give himself alone.

However, that inability to love each other without intermediaries, is exactly what we see on a daily basis. Because the thing is, maybe no one taught us to be our own point of reference. And that learning, even if it comes late, completely changes the relationship we have with ourselves and even with others. Do you know why? Well, because we are our convictions, values, bonds, stories and what gives meaning to our life.

In the end, life is not measured by the things we accumulate, but by the memories we build. An object can be kept safe in a box, but an experience can stay living in the soul, because things wear out, but memories have the ability to accompany us forever.

Janitze.🌷