Riding the Waves of Inheritance

In the steam, I see her, I see me, I see all of us, threads of lineage woven through mist and memory.

Riding the Waves of Inheritance

Yesterday morning, after releasing my song The Bond, I stepped into the shower expecting nothing more than a few minutes under warm water and a chance to gather myself for the day. But as often happens, the steam began to swirl around me like a living presence, curling and shifting as though it carried stories of its own. The shower became a chamber of revelation, the water drumming against my skin like a heartbeat, steady and insistent. In that mist, a scribe seemed to emerge, not with ink, but with vapor, and with it came a download, a vision that rippled through me like a truth too insistent to remain hidden.

I’ve known the word over-functioning and its meaning for a couple of years now. When I first stumbled across its definition, I was stunned, it felt as though someone had stolen my diary and published it for the world. Every line mirrored my life so perfectly I half-joked that I should be receiving royalties for it.

And no, I never consciously believed I was the only one who carried this role. But what struck me in that shower was different. The veil lifted, and I suddenly saw it not just as my struggle but as part of a much larger inheritance, a thread of dysfunction woven through my maternal lineage.

I saw my grandmother.

I saw my mother.

I saw myself.

And for the first time, I saw the mirror between us with startling clarity.

The Lineage of Over-Functioning

Over-functioning is survival dressed up as competence. It is what happens when you learn early that love, safety, or stability isn’t guaranteed, so you overextend to create it yourself. You become the one who anticipates needs before they are voiced, who carries burdens that do not belong to you, who exhausts herself patching holes in sinking ships.

I now see how little me was already over-functioning. At just five years old, I fought my way into first grade when a friend of my mother’s took me to meet the school director. I begged her to let me start school early, and she agreed. Then, only a few months later, my mother chose to sleep in and asked me to stay home. I said, hell no. I dressed myself, made my lunch, and crossed busy streets alone to get to school. She did not arrive until recess time. At the time, I was made to think this was such an endearing act of determination, that I was capable and independent. But the truth is, I had been forced into being the grown-up far too early. Over-functioning was never a badge of honor, it was the armor I wore to survive.

Looking back, I understand that what I carried as a little girl wasn’t born in isolation. It didn’t begin with me dressing myself for school or begging to be admitted into first grade at five years old, it was already encoded into the family system. I had simply picked up the mantle that had been passed down without knowing it. My determination to survive was a reflection of my mother’s own, and hers before her.

And as the echoes of my song The Bond rang in my mind, I looked at my mother through that lens and realized, she lived the same story. She too held everything together while tethered to a partner who gave too little. My grandmother lived it as well, raising eight children with military precision, married to my grandfather, a sweet but meek man who left the weight of daily survival squarely on her shoulders.

Suddenly, my patterns weren’t just mine, they were theirs, and likely my great-grandmother’s too. This way of being wasn’t invented in me, it was inherited.

It is sobering to recognize that what we sometimes mistake for personality is often legacy. This lineage does not just pass down eye color or cheekbones or even diabetes, it passes down coping mechanisms, survival strategies, ways of being that calcify into identity.

But seeing it does not mean excusing it. I can have compassion for the chain without pretending it did not leave bruises. I can grieve the tenderness my mother lost to survival mode while also grieving the tenderness I never received from her because of it.

Holding the Paradox

And this is where the real work lies, in holding the paradox without collapsing into either side.

On one hand, I feel compassion, my mother did the best she could with the tools she had, and I have heard her say the same of her own mother. I see her exhaustion, the sacrifices, the quiet despair of never being fully cared for herself.

On the other hand, the child in me still aches. That ache does not vanish just because I can intellectualize her limitations. No matter how much understanding I cultivate, there remains the simple wound of what was missing, the mother I needed, but never had.

For years, I thought I had to choose, either grieve or forgive, and yes, that is what everyone else tells you. Either honor my pain or absolve hers. But in that shower, I realized integrating does not ask me to choose, it asks me to stretch. To expand my heart wide enough to hold grief and compassion side by side, to let anger and understanding breathe in the same vessel.

It is not tidy. It is not linear. But paradox rarely is. And maybe that is where the real alchemy happens, in learning that two opposing truths can live in one body without tearing it apart.

The Voices Within Me

As the water poured over me, I could feel the chorus of voices that make up my inner landscape, rising and mingling with the steam.

The woman I am now, who has done the long and grueling work of healing, who can finally name the dysfunction and choose differently. She feels compassion, yes, but also strength, because she knows she is capable of breaking the cycle.

The little girl, small and tender, who still longs for arms that never wrapped around her the way she needed. Her grief is raw and unedited. She does not care about explanations, she just aches.

The teenager, fierce and fiery, who is angry at the injustice of it all. She rages that her mother did not find the courage or the emotional intelligence to do this work herself. She names the failure and refuses to sugarcoat it.

Each of these voices deserves to be heard. Denying one would be denying a part of myself. My role now is not to silence them but to weave them together, to be the vessel strong enough to let them all exist without shame.

The Grief of What She Couldn’t Do

Perhaps the hardest truth is this, my mother simply could not do this work. Whether bound by her own wounds, her fears, or her lack of capacity, she could not step onto the path of integration.

That truth cuts like glass. Part of me longs for the version of her who could have walked beside me in this journey as an emotionally available mother. The version who might have looked me in the eyes and said, “I see you. I am here for you.”

But another part of me softens. I see her limitations not as deliberate cruelty but as the echo of her own unhealed story. She did not fail me because she did not care, she failed because she was carrying her own unseen weight.

And what she could not do, I now choose to do.

I take the threads of grief, anger, compassion, and sorrow, and I weave them into a bridge that spans generations. My mother gave me life, I am now choosing to give that life healing. And maybe that is the most radical form of love I can offer, to her, to myself, and to those who come after me.

And Then Came the Shower Epiphany

All of this, compassion, grief, anger, sorrow, arrived in the span of a single shower. By the time I rinsed the conditioner from my hair, I had traveled through decades of inherited pain and lifetimes of integration.

And honestly?

Showers now really should come with a warning label, Side effects may include sudden breakthroughs, unexpected maternal revelations, and multi-generational therapy sessions in under ten minutes.

☥

Wondering what song was echoing through the steam as these revelations found me? Follow the frequency, listen to The Bond here 👇