This one’s a bit personal, folks. I hope that sharing part of my story and the way that trauma metastasized in hustle culture will be helpful or meaningful in some way for you.

Content Warning: extreme childhood poverty, toxic work culture, etc., please take care while reading. 💜

Goal-setting is my shadow’s defense mechanism.

My shadow is the timid little girl in me who endured abuse and lived in poverty. Every moment was one she dreaded, but she had one escape from her present situation: dreaming about the future.

She desperately wanted to think of anything other than living in a trailer without running water or heat. Of having to shit in a bucket and having to bury it in the woods or heating a pot of water to use as a “shower”, even though the bathroom temperature was barely above 30 degrees.

Between the abject poverty and abuse from her stepfather, she spent as much Time in the woods as she could, dreaming about being an adult with the freedom and resources to go where she wanted to and to leave those who tried to harm her behind.

Soon, that little girl turned into a young adult who decided where she wanted her life to go. But that young adult took that little girl’s defense mechanism with her.

She always set ambitious goals for herself and dreamed of her future because she never learned to enjoy the only moment she was guaranteed: the present.

Why focus on the present moment, anyway? The further she ran into the future, the further she ran away from the humiliation of that trailer and the miserable little girl inside it.

At that Time, that young adult worked in the corporate world, where her corporation took her misguided beliefs about working to the bone on aggressive goals and exploited them to the fullest.

She happily bent over backward for the corporation because getting a department’s sales figures into the black was sure as fuck a lot easier than escaping abuse and poverty.

She continued burning her candle at both ends because no matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t run faster than Chronos. Escaping into the future isn’t a sustainable option because humans can only truly exist in one moment: the present.

Chronos, an ancient Greek deity, is an anthropomorphic representation of Time, and is much more powerful than a young woman who only ever knew how to desperately escape into the future.

Once the ends of her burning candle burned out, it was as if Chronos himself yanked her suddenly from the future and made her fall on her ass in the present.

But that’s the responsibility of intangible concepts like Time itself, right?

Time reminds silly little humans of their one true mortal responsibility: experiencing the full breadth of where they are NOW.

Now, as a…let’s say… not a young adult, but slightly-older-than-that adult… I’m not running from where I am in the present.

I take on my human responsibility of graciously accepting Chronos’s true gift: this moment.

And I’m also not running from that little girl or what she went through. I’m holding her hand and telling her, “We did good, kid.”

✨ Felt a spark?

If something in this piece stirred something in you—made you think, feel, or see the world a little differently—and you’d like to support the work, and you’d rather not subscribe monthly, you can leave a one-off tip or buy me a coffee. I keep all my posts free, so your support helps me keep this space shared, not gated.

Thank you for reading!