Awakening Didn’t Fail You — The Story Did

Most people assume that whatever they think or feel must belong to them. That their judgments are personal. Their exhaustion is personal. Their sense of failure, their lack of motivation, their quiet shame. We say things like “that’s just how I am” or “I’ve always been like this” and we never stop to ask where those thoughts came from, or why they sound so familiar across so many lives.

What if a large part of what you think and feel isn’t personal at all.

What if it’s inherited. Absorbed. Rehearsed. Intuited.  Passed along so seamlessly that it feels like identity.

I’m not talking about anything mystical here. I’m talking about psychology, patterns, roles, and the way humans exchange information just by being near each other.

Psychology already knows this at one level. Take something like perfectionism. That’s not a mystery. It has a whole mapped-out structure. Predictable thoughts. Predictable behaviors. Predictable suffering. That’s why therapists can work with it. Because it follows a script.

Now imagine three neighbors living on the same block. All three carry some form of perfectionism. One learned it through subtle emotional abuse and internalized shame. Another added the role of the successful businessperson and locked away fear and anger behind competence and control. The third learned early that worth comes from performance, even without obvious trauma.

Different expressions. Same underlying pattern.

They don’t know each other’s stories. But their inner dialogue rhymes.

Here’s where most people miss something important. Human beings don’t exist in isolation. We co-regulate emotionally. We mirror unconsciously. We synchronize in proximity. Just being around other people, we exchange information. Not ideas. Felt states.

Every unresolved wound you carry is broadcasting. Every unresolved wound around you is receiving. When two people share a similar internal pattern, shame, scarcity, rage, perfectionism, those patterns recognize each other instantly. They resonate. They amplify. They exchange.

It’s less like infection and more like tuning forks. Hit one and the other starts vibrating.

This happens intuitively. Telepathically if you want to use that word. Without intention. Without belief. Without consent. And because no one ever taught us to track it, we assume whatever we’re feeling must be ours.

You might walk through your day feeling fine. Then you enter a space. Work. A store. A family gathering. A neighborhood. And something shifts. You feel heavier. More judgmental. More apathetic. More self-critical. Disconnected from yourself. Nothing actually happened, so your mind does what it was trained to do. It assigns ownership.

Why am I like this.

What’s wrong with me.

I shouldn’t feel this way.

And just like that, a borrowed emotional signal becomes a personal flaw.

That’s how intuitive exchange turns into identity. Not because you’re weak. Because you’re human.

Now zoom out. What happens between neighbors also happens between offices, towns, cities, entire cultures. When enough people carry the same unresolved emotional pattern, it stops feeling like emotion and starts feeling like atmosphere. A workplace can feel dead. A town can feel hopeless. A city can feel tense. An era can feel anxious.

At scale, these shared emotional patterns become self-reinforcing. You don’t have to manipulate everyone. You just have to manipulate enough people. The rest will pick it up through proximity. That’s how moods spread. That’s how moral panics spread. That’s how fear becomes normal. That’s how judgment becomes reflex.

This has been happening for thousands of years. And many of the emotions you feel today didn’t start with you at all.

Some of them were handed down through families shaped by poverty, isolation, war, scarcity, survival pressure. You don’t just inherit stories. You inherit felt expectations.

I learned this the hard way.

I had a huge emotional reaction to being forced to live in a trailer. Deep embarrassment. Shame. A feeling that I had failed completely. And the thing is, the trailer itself was fine. I actually loved it. The feeling didn’t match reality. So I followed it.

In journeying, I traced that feeling backward. Through my parents. And into the town they grew up in. A poor farming town. Isolated. Few options. No room for dreaming. Hovering above it, I could feel the collective voice of that place.

How am I going to pay for this.

I need a job.

This is all there is.

Don’t hope for more.

That shame wasn’t mine. It belonged to a lineage shaped by survival. Once I saw it clearly, it lost its authority. I didn’t stop being poor. I stopped feeling ashamed of it. Perspective gave me power over it. I took my power back. And I’ve never had that judgment again.

I am poor. There’s no denying it. I was taken out of the workforce twenty years too early. I lost the chance to build the kind of retirement most people rely on. I now live the way many elderly and disabled people do. Hand to mouth. That’s reality. But I don’t have to feel bad about it. And interestingly enough, I’ve never gone without. Not yet. Life still provides for me.

This is why self-reflection matters. Not the kind where you analyze yourself into oblivion. The kind where you slow down enough to ask where something came from.

Do I judge people and not know why.

Do I come home from work feeling awful without a clear reason.

Do certain places drain me immediately.

Do some thoughts feel familiar but not chosen.

These are signs you may be running someone else’s story.

The Between is the position where you pause long enough to notice that. It’s not escape. It’s not denial. It’s the place where you stop automatically claiming everything that passes through your mind as you.

From there, you can trace a feeling backward. To a family. To a town. To a workplace. To a culture. To a survival role. And when you see the lineage, the loop loosens.

You don’t have to reject reality. You don’t have to pretend things are easy. You just stop carrying shame that isn’t yours.

And when you do that, something very simple and very quiet happens. You begin to discover your baseline. What you actually like. What you actually care about. What you actually dream of. Not the worker version of you. Not the adapted version. Not the version shaped by fear and survival.

Just you.

And once you hear that signal, even faintly, the rest starts to reorganize on its own.