The Voice in Your Head Isn’t Alone

The first time I felt powerless—where do I even begin?

Like most people searching for answers, I start with childhood.

Adults had power. I didn’t.
They told me what to feel, what to do, what to say—and I learned quickly to hand myself over. Because they must know better. That’s what you’re taught.

But even then, something didn’t fully settle.

If chaos, control, and powerlessness had an address, it would have been mine.

The kind of powerlessness you take to a lawyer, a judge, or HR—“they made me feel powerless”—good luck getting anyone to see it as enough. Good luck getting it fixed that way. Because the world doesn’t hand you power just because someone else tried to take it from you. It doesn’t live in authority, in rules, in witnesses.

Real power lives elsewhere. It lives in knowing yourself. In seeing what each moment of being powerless actually taught you. In holding yourself accountable for your own ground, even when the world is shifting under your feet.

Power wasn’t stable in my world. It moved. It shifted. It was negotiated in real time. Between parents, between partners—who had it, who was losing it, who needed more. Sometimes it was subtle. A tone that lingered too long. A sentence designed to land exactly where it hurt.

And sometimes it wasn’t subtle at all.

Sometimes it was physical. A body knocked off balance. A collapse into furniture. Something visible enough that it couldn’t be denied—yet somehow still left unnamed.

And still, it was understood as power. As strength.

I absorbed that, even when I didn’t agree with it.

I learned that power was something outside of me. Something to gain, to lose, to protect myself from. Something that lived in other people—their moods, their reactions, their approval.

And somewhere in that, I also learned to confuse feeling with truth.

If someone felt disrespected, then disrespect must have happened.
If someone felt small, then someone else must have made them that way.

It wasn’t questioned. It wasn’t examined. It just was.

But that kind of power—the kind that assigns ownership of your internal state to someone else—is difficult to hold up to the light. It’s real, but it’s also incomplete.

Because what I didn’t understand then is what I’m starting to understand now:

If you don’t come to know yourself, you will keep trying to locate power in places that can’t hold it.

In other people.
In authority.
In control.
In not being the one who loses.

And I’ve seen where that leads.

It leads to repetition. To people reenacting the same dynamics, calling it something else. Calling it love, or leadership, or truth—when it’s often something far less stable.

Something closer to uncertainty, trying to pass as certainty.

I don’t think most people are aware they’re doing it.

And I don’t think I was, either.

Because there’s a difference between experiencing powerlessness and becoming defined by it. And I’m starting to see that I learned to expect it, to recognize it, maybe even to organize myself around it—without realizing there might be another way to understand it.

Not as something someone else gives or takes.

But as something you claim when you give yourself permission—to feel, to speak, to act—in every way power shows up through you, for you, and by you.