We Were Never Islands

I used to preach it too.

“You are the sole authority and creator of your life.”

I said it in group chats. I built entire offerings around it. I said it after breakups, after fights with my mother, after every moment someone hurt me and I needed a doctrine fast enough to keep the hurt from meaning anything. It felt like armor. It felt, for a while, like the most empowered sentence a woman could say.

I don’t say it anymore. Not because it’s false, exactly — there’s a sliver of truth buried in it, the part about not being a passive victim of your own mind, or your circumstances (which are in a constant state of change). But I stopped saying it because I finally noticed what it does. It doesn’t empower you. It evacuates you. Quietly, one sentence at a time, it moves you out of the house of relationship and drops you on an island, and then calls the island freedom.

Think about what the phrase actually requires you to believe. That you were self-made. That your nervous system, your longing, your capacity to be wounded and healed, arrived in you fully formed, untouched by any hand but your own. That when your mother’s voice could steady you as an infant, that wasn’t real contact — it was your interpretation. That when someone’s contempt lands in your chest like a stone, that’s a choice you’re making, and if you were just evolved enough, disciplined enough, healed enough, it wouldn’t touch you at all.

That’s not maturity — that’s dissociation wearing the language of sovereignty.

I have come out of a state of amnesia, since becoming and being a mama. For a long time I forgot the most basic fact of my own existence, and I dressed the forgetting up as growth.

Because here is what’s actually true, and what took me a long time and a lot of unlearning to come back to:

I did not make myself. I was made — in relation, by relation, for relation.

Knit together, not self-assembled. Fed by hands that weren’t my own before I could feed myself. Every single thing about how we regulate, how we love, how we grieve, how we trust — it was built in the space between us and someone else, long before we had the cognitive architecture to consent to it or curate it. We are relational all the way down. Not as a nice add-on to an otherwise autonomous self — as the actual material we’re made of.

So when the culture hands us “no one can make you feel anything” as liberation, I think it’s worth asking: liberation from what, exactly? From accountability, sometimes — fair enough. But also, quietly, from the claim other people are allowed to have on us. From grief being anyone’s fault but the griever’s. From love requiring anything of us in return. It’s a philosophy that scales beautifully with a culture already starved for real attachment, because it tells the starved person their hunger is a design flaw instead of a design feature.

I don’t think most people who say this are narcissists. I think most of us — myself absolutely included — reached for it because we’d been hurt inside relationship and it felt safer to exit the whole category than to stay in it and get hurt again. Hyperindividualism isn’t usually chosen from strength. It’s usually chosen from a wound that never got tended, dressed up in the language of a wellness retreat.

What sobered me up wasn’t a better argument. It was watching what the belief cost the people who lived it fully — how “I’m not responsible for how you feel” quietly became “I’m not responsible for you,” full stop. How a philosophy of total self-authorship, taken all the way down, produces people who are very hard to actually love, because loving someone means letting their reality make a claim on yours.

We were not built to be islands issuing our own reality by decree. We were built in the between — the space where a cry meets an answer, where a hand finds another hand and only then learns what a hand is for. And despite what you have been taught / told, that’s not a threat to your freedom.

So here’s the question I’d leave you with: if no one can make you feel anything, then what was the hand for? What was the cry-and-answer for — the years of being held before you were ever able to ask for it? If you were truly sovereign over your own reality from the start, why did you need anyone at all?

In the beginning, God didn’t say let Me make man in My image.

Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image” 𝗚𝗲𝗻𝗲𝘀𝗶𝘀 𝟭:𝟮𝟲.

Not a solitary Maker fashioning solitary creatures — a communion, Father, Son, Spirit, already in relation before anything else existed, and out of that relation, us. We weren’t stamped out one by one, sealed and self-sufficient. We were made in the shape of the relationship that made us.

Which means the island was never the truth. It was only ever the wound — the wound of separation, borne in the Garden, the moment we first hid from God and from each other in the same breath.