The Eternal Return

We begin with a truth most cannot carry: you are not living your life. You are living your wound. What you call ambition, love, spirituality, politics—these are veils over a hidden engine. A trauma engine. And until you name it and break it, you will keep running the same scripts under new disguises.

The past does not vanish. It repeats. Not as memory, but as compulsion. A record stuck on the same groove. Shame. Panic. Humiliation. Again and again. Not because you want it—but because somewhere in you is the lie: If I am good enough, strong enough, perfect enough—I can undo what happened.

You cannot.

This is the cut most will never accept: the past is final. Fixed. You will not rewrite the moment you were silenced, ignored, abandoned, broken. The child you once were is already gone. The wound will not be erased. And all the rituals of “healing”—the books, the breathwork, the lovers, the accolades—are usually just covert attempts at erasure. Control dressed up as growth.

The wound does not disappear. It is not holy. It is not evil. It simply is. And it is not you.

Your task is not to heal it but to build beyond it.

The child’s original narcissism—the spark that makes us walk, speak, become—when crushed, becomes shame, rage, numbness. That scar tissue becomes your adult voice, your relationships, your vision of the world. Most spend their lives reacting to this—through chemicals, ideologies, performances, or by becoming the opposite of what broke them. But reaction is not freedom.

Freedom begins when you accept the finality of the wound. When you grieve without bargaining. When you stop praying for a past that never comes back. This is not weakness. It is the first act of power. Because only then can your will return to the present—to your body, to the ground under your feet, to the work ahead.

Most will never do this. They will stay trapped, circling the same repetition, mistaking echoes for destiny. But a few—the ones who walk the path of the Extreme Individual—will break the circle. They will not seek erasure. They will seek emergence. Not healing in the soft sense, but integration in the hard sense. They will use the wound as a forge. They will become themselves because of it, not in spite of it.

You do not need to be whole to be free. You need only be willing.

Willing to give up the fantasy of justice. Willing to live without needing the past to change. Willing to walk without a guarantee.

This is not therapy. Not salvation. Not a trick. It is the reckoning.

Become who you are. Not who your parents needed. Not who the wound scripted. Not who the world rewards. Become the one who sees the loop and steps outside it. The one who says: I accept what was. I choose what is. I will create what comes.

There are no promises. There is only the work. The work is real. The work is yours.

Editors note:

This is an updated version of a previous draft I wasn’t happy with.