When did it start? · Throne Of Her Own

Ashley Hairston

2d • General discussion

When did it start?

I want to ask you something that most people never think to ask.

Not what the "I am" statement is.

Not even where it came from.

But when.

— — —

Think back.

Not to the first time you heard the words out loud — because most of the time nobody said them directly. Think back to the first time you felt it. The first time something happened and you quietly concluded something about yourself that you have been living by ever since.

How old were you?

Five? Eight? Eleven? Fifteen?

Most women, when they really sit with this question, find a little girl.

Not a grown woman who made a logical decision about her own worth. A child. A child who was doing the only thing a child can do — absorbing what was in her environment and making sense of it the only way she knew how.

That child decided something.

And the woman has been living by that decision ever since.

— — —

👑 I'll go first.

Mine started young. Before I had words for it.

It was not one moment — it was a pattern. A repeated experience of bringing my full emotional world into a space that did not know how to hold it. And the message I received, not in words but in withdrawals, in silences, in the particular look that said you are too much —

was that something about the way I was made was a problem.

I was somewhere around five or six the first time I remember making myself smaller so the people around me could be more comfortable.

The seed was planted by someone who was never taught how to hold their own emotions — let alone mine. That is not an excuse. It is a context. And context is what allows us to stop carrying what was never ours to carry.

— — —

Now I want to hear from you.

Two questions. Answer one or both — as much or as little as you feel ready to share.

✦ What age do you feel your loudest "I am" statement began? When was the first time you felt that conclusion settle into your body — even if you did not have language for it then?

✦ Who planted the seed? Who was the person — or the people — whose words, silences, actions, or absences gave you the first materials to build your armor from?

— — —

You do not have to name names.

You do not have to have it fully figured out.

You do not even have to be sure — a sense, a feeling, a flicker of recognition is enough.

What you share here will not be judged. It will not be analyzed or advised upon. It will simply be witnessed.

Because the little girl who made that decision deserved to be witnessed then.

And the woman she became deserves it now. 🤍

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