This morning, out of nowhere, I had a strange and sudden realization that felt less like an epiphany and more like a truth finally stepping out of the shadows and clearing its throat.
It hit me in a way that it never has that I have never lived a “normal” life. Not even close. And for the first time, I felt both strangely happy about that fact and, at the same time, a little bit like life handed me a rigged deck from the beginning.
Maybe it’s the moon. Maybe it’s a transit. Maybe it’s just timing. Either way, something clicked.
And if you’ve lived a life anything like mine — a life full of early ruptures, spiritual bends, hard-earned wisdom, and more turning points than you asked for — then maybe this will resonate with you too.
Some of us woke up “too early.”
I think there are people in this world who become different because of trauma… and then there are people who were already different before anything bad ever happened.
I fall into the second category, and maybe you do too. Even before the losses and the betrayals and the hard choices of life, I always had that sense of being “other.” Not better, not worse — just operating at a different depth. And when you put a child like that into an environment that can’t meet them, or worse, harms them, it doesn’t create the strangeness. It simply intensifies the contrast.
Being awake too early will always make life feel both heavy and crystalline. Extraordinarily beautiful and impossibly painful. More than you can stand, and somehow exactly what your soul signed up for.
My life began mid-sentence. It began with trauma — separation at birth, adoption, the whole invisible story that comes before the first memory. And when your life starts that way, it’s like opening a book already in motion. You’re responding before you even know what you’re responding to.
People who haven’t lived this don’t understand it. They don’t understand the tracking, the depth, the intuition, the constant meaning-making, the sensitivity that isn’t fragility but perception.
They don’t understand why you see everything. Why you feel everything. Why you cannot live on the surface of yourself. But some of us were built this way, and some of us were shaped this way. Both can be true.
It’s a double-edged realization. As this awareness came in today, I felt two very different truths rising at the same time:
I love who I’ve become. I love my depth, my discernment, my perspective, my capacity. I love that I can see through people and patterns and illusions. I love that nothing stays on the surface for me. I love that I’ve survived every version of myself I’ve ever had to be.
I also grieve the softness I never got. I grieve the easy childhood that never existed. I grieve the uncomplicated love I didn’t receive early on. I grieve the sense of safety I had to build by hand.
And I think a lot of us who’ve lived through big, early, life-defining trauma feel this way: grateful for who we are, but aware of the price we paid to become it.
This doesn’t make us “confused.” It makes us honest. It makes us the “weird one.”
Someone I love deeply even to this day, but lost because of my depth, once told me, “Everybody thinks you’re weird.” They meant it to sting, and it did for a second, because it came from someone who should have known better. But after the sting passed, I realized:
People say “weird” when they really mean, “I can’t categorize you, and that makes me uncomfortable.”
People like us — the ones who survived too much, grew too fast, felt too deeply — we are not weird. We are densely written. And people who only read in small print will never understand a book like us.
That’s fine. It is truly okay. We have to learn to let them go, even when it’s the last thing we want to do. We have to learn to let them stay on Sesame Street if that’s the universe they need, and love them from afar. We weren’t made for that kind of world, and that’s what I learned from that “dig.”
It changed my entire being and life experience, because it gave me vision into both myself and into the psychology of others that I’d only ever read in books and studied during undergrad. It led me to where I’ve been for the last year or so. The crossover point.
If you’re reading this because you searched a tag related to being somewhere in that liminal space — not who you used to be, not quite who you’re becoming — let me tell you something from the messy, holy middle of my own transformation:
Your life is not normal because it was never meant to be. You weren’t built for the simple version.
People like us come in with assignments: to break generational patterns that have the power to wake up entire lineages. To spiritualize the places that were barren. To heal things we didn’t cause. To mother differently.
We are here to live awake. To see through the noise. To choose purpose over pattern. To walk into the “better” with our eyes open.
My own perspective, after years of seeking and purposeful, mindful, active awareness, has become that we were born into struggle on purpose. To make mistakes, to suffer, to learn, and then to teach and to use our experiences to help heal the world. Because we can.
Our struggle prepares us for our purpose, because without that preparation I can promise you that the last five years would have killed me — not grown me or led me to God.
It’s not an easy calling, and it’s rarely fair. It’s often lonely, and it’s never “easy.” But… it is real. And it will be worth it, in the end.
If you’ve made it this far — bruised, aware, still standing — then the next chapter will not require the same kind of suffering the earlier ones did.
This is the turning point. The crossing over. The place where the story stops being about survival and starts being about purpose.
You’ve earned this part. You really have. Use it to make your life everything you’ve ever dreamed of. I believe you can, because I’ve lived it. I’ve put the pieces together, and I know that if any of this resonates with you, you can do anything.
It’s what you were made for.
xo,
c.
catacosmosis 