On Legacy, Repair, and Being Seen
What will I be when I grow up?
It’s a question I never had a solid answer to—not at eight, not at eighteen, not even now as i turn fifty. But it’s a question that keeps returning, reframed not as an external expectation but an internal curiosity. Maybe it’s not about what I’ll be, but what I’ll do. And maybe what I’ll do won’t be clear until I’ve done it. Until I’ve lived it. Until the shape of my life speaks for itself.
Lately, I’ve been holding a question from two ends:
If I got to the end of my life and my children were free, would that be enough?
And when I say free, I mean really free—from the burdens of generational trauma, free from administrative confusion about who they are or are allowed to be, free to simply be the siblings they want to be to one another and build the relationships they need with others, free to make decisions as suit where they are at in life … but I had left no legacy. No book. No course. No house let alone real estate portfolio! No bank account. Nothing attributed to my name, nothing for the public to point to and say, "They were here."
Would that be enough?
And on the other end of the spectrum: If I did leave something—a work of significance to me, something I created through consistency and being myself, something celebrated and remembered—but in doing so, I hadn’t fully resolved or metabolised the trauma I inherited and passed it forward, leaving it embedded in my children’s lives like asbestos in the walls…
Would that be worth it?
The heart answers quickly. The soul whispers with clarity. Of course, I would choose their freedom over my visibility. Of course, their emotional sovereignty matters more than a monument to my effort.
There are days however, that find my mind and emotional experience pulling and pushing in their shared space. Times when the mind needs scaffolding. Times when emotions aren't sure which experience they are responding to. The mind struggling in the absence of proof. It wants to name, to see, to witness something that says, you did well. That something happened because of me. That I mattered. And I know that this might be because of the emotional work yet to come or a way of creating purpose in lieu of feeling loneliness. But either way, still significant.
And so I find myself mapping the terrain between these poles—trying to find the middle ground between survival and sovereignty, healing and legacy, presence and visibility.
I realise: I am living emotional health, not defining it. I am not constructing theories in isolation. I am moving through them, body-first, breath-first, by repairing what I can and letting go of what I can’t. My emotional health is visible in how I’ve chosen not to pass certain things forward. How I’ve parented. How I've committed to healthy practices despite societal and sometimes, much more aggressive, pressures. How I’ve stayed present in discomfort, even when I longed to disappear, settle into apathy or by direct contrast, prove something by becoming bigger, louder and more.
This is inclusive practice, too—not just out there, in systems and language and advocacy, but in here. Inside me.
Am I including myself in the freedom I’m working so hard to create for others? Am I allowed to want something for myself—not instead of healing, but alongside it?
This reflection belongs in the body of work I’m building, even if no one ever reads it. It complicates the binary of success and failure, impact and invisibility. It asks: What if your legacy is not a product, but a pattern? Not a named achievement, but an invisible freedom from ties, passed down?
Maybe healing is a legacy. Maybe being deeply present, even invisibly, is a contribution. Maybe the work is happening anyway simply because of my consistency and life long (not just parenting) commitment.
And maybe—just maybe—there will be time for both: healing and creating. Repairing the past and offering something to the future.
By the end of my life, the answer to "what did I do?" will have written itself. It will have been worth it and that will be enough.
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