Tapestry Series #2

Every tapestry has knots, frays, and uneven edges — yet together they create beauty and depth. Our ancestral stories are no different.

Nobody sat me down and said: we don’t talk about the hard things.

It was just the way it was. Difficulty got folded away. Pain was managed quietly. Feelings that were too big or too complicated simply didn’t have a place at the table.

I absorbed this the way children absorb everything. Through what was said and, more powerfully, through what wasn’t.

For a long time I didn’t even see it as a pattern. It was just life. Just how things were done. It wasn’t until I started looking more carefully at my lineage — at the women and men who came before me — that I began to recognize the thread.

We don’t choose the threads we’re born into. But we do get to choose what we do with them.

Here’s the complicated truth about inherited patterns: they usually begin as protection.

Somewhere in my lineage, staying quiet about hard things kept someone safe. Maybe it kept the peace. Maybe it was the only way to survive something that couldn’t be spoken. The silence wasn’t random. It had a purpose once.

But patterns outlive their purpose. They get passed forward — not because they still serve, but because they’re woven in. Because nobody thought to question them. Because questioning them would have meant speaking the unspeakable.

And so the thread continues…

I carried that silence for years. Into friendships. Into difficult conversations I avoided. Into moments when I knew something needed to be said and I folded it away instead, tidy and private and unspoken.

It protected me. And it cost me.

Both things were true at the same time.

The thread we most want to deny is often the one asking to be healed.

What shifted things for me wasn’t a conversation. It wasn’t therapy or journaling or making myself speak up more.

It was ReUnion.

In the ReUnion space, I discovered something I hadn’t expected — that the silence wasn’t only in my mind or in my habits. It was in my body. Held in the cells. Passed forward through the DNA like a quiet instruction: don’t say it. don’t show it. keep it in.

When the body finally had a place to release what the mind had never been allowed to speak, something loosened. Not all at once. But unmistakably.

That’s the thing about inherited threads. You can understand them intellectually and still carry them. The healing that lasts isn’t always the kind that happens in the head. Sometimes it has to go all the way down through the body.

I share this not because my story is yours. Your inherited thread may look completely different — a pattern of overworking, of shrinking, of people-pleasing, of rage, of grief that was never given room. Every family has its thread. Every lineage has what it couldn’t hold.

The question isn’t whether you inherited something.

The question is: are you ready to look at it?

Not to pull it out. Not to cut it away. But to understand what it is — and choose, consciously, what comes next.

That’s the work of the tapestry.

Thread by thread.