If you spend enough time listening to people give advice on how to handle a crisis, you will eventually hear the exact same phrase repeated over and over again.
Just wait it out.
They say it about grief. They say it about financial droughts. They say it about toxic family dynamics and broken relationships. This too shall pass. Just wait out the storm.
I used to believe that. I used to think that endurance simply meant standing still, pulling your coat tight around your shoulders, and letting the freezing rain batter you until the clouds finally decided to run out of water.
But I read something recently that completely rewired my brain.
When a massive storm rolls across the plains, herds of cattle will naturally try to run away from it. They see the black clouds, they panic, and they run in the exact same direction the wind is blowing. Because they are running with the storm, they end up trapped underneath the freezing rain for days, extending their own misery.
But buffalo do something entirely different.
When a buffalo sees a storm coming, it turns its massive head, lowers its horns, and charges directly into the black wall of the weather. By running head-on into the storm, they pass through the worst of it in a fraction of the time. They take the absolute hardest, most violent path, because they know it is the fastest route to the clear sky on the other side.
Lately, I have stopped running away.
I am charging the storm.
Tonight hit me incredibly hard since it is Father’s Day week; the universe decided it was the perfect time to test my endurance. The man who helped bring my son into this world showed up, carrying the exact same counterfeit currency he always does: empty promises. He spoke the words he knows he will never honor, and then acted genuinely shocked when I refused to play the game. When I looked at him with absolute, unbothered clarity and told him I was no longer accepting his illusions, he did what ghosts do best. He flipped. He vanished. I sat there after he left, waiting for the shock, but only disappointment came.
But here is the thing about ghosts: they are usually just messengers.
His brief, chaotic appearance didn’t break me. It just picked the lock on a much older, much heavier door inside my mind. It forced me to look at the real storm. Because once you start telling yourself the truth about one form of abandonment, you usually have to start telling yourself the truth about all of them.
The storm didn’t start with him. The storm started in the very house I grew up in.
There is a very unique, silent tragedy in realizing that the people who were biologically mandated to be your safe harbor were actually the architects of your anxiety.
I look back at the woman who raised me, and the realization hits me like a physical blow: she was never my safe space. When you are a young girl, your mother is supposed to be a vault. She is supposed to be the soft place you land when the world scrapes your knees. But my vault always leaked. Anything I handed to her in confidence was immediately weaponized. It was traded over tea, whispered in hallways, and handed over to a husband who didn’t know how to handle it either.
Because of that, the emotional doors in my childhood home were permanently welded shut.
Nobody talked about feelings. Nobody approached the heavy things. The two people running the house existed in a silent, barren ecosystem, only breaking the quiet to discuss the logistics of extended family drama or who died in the village.
I remember a day in college. The baby’s father had just pulled a stunt, intentionally humiliating me. I was shattered. I went back to that childhood house, crying so hard I could barely pull air into my lungs.
Do you know what happened?
Absolutely nothing.
No one knocked on the door. No one came to sit on the edge of the bed. They just ignored the sound of my sobbing until I exhausted myself, calmed my own nervous system down, packed my bags, and went back to my own life.
You learn a very dangerous lesson when you cry in a crowded house and no one comes. You learn that your pain is an inconvenience. You learn to wait out the storm entirely alone.
And that isolation didn’t just apply to the bad days. It applied to the triumphs, too.
When I finally crossed the finish line of my education, when I stood there in the cap and gown, waiting to be seen, my mother wasn’t there. An aunt had passed away, and the burial was scheduled for the next day. A valid tragedy, yes. But time is a matter of choices. She could have sat in the audience, watched me cross the stage, and traveled through the night to honor the dead.
She chose not to. She chose the burial over the beginning.
There was no party. There was no celebration. Just a hollow, empty promise that they would “make it up to me.”
Two full years have passed since that day. Two years of silence regarding that milestone.
But the silence is entirely conditional. Because the absolute second I secured a job and began making my own money, the phone suddenly remembered how to ring.
Suddenly, the daughter whose graduation was an afterthought was expected to be the primary investor in the family portfolio.
The audacity of it used to make my blood run hot. My father actually became angry when I didn’t immediately turn my paycheck over. We didn’t speak for a long time after that, and honestly, the quiet was a relief. I appreciate the logistics of what he did; the school fees, the basic provisions of childhood, the roof over my head. But providing the baseline requirements of survival does not entitle you to a lifelong tax on my peace. Every time we talk, I hang up the phone feeling like someone has drained the blood out of my veins.
And then there is the single syllable that haunts my text messages.
When my mother asks for money, and I have to look at my own bills, my own child, my own business, and tell her I do not have it, she replies with one word.
Ok.
I used to loathe that word. I hated the sharp, passive-aggressive weight of it. It is a weapon designed to inflict maximum guilt with minimum effort. It is the word of a person who has never once called just to ask how my day was. Never once called to ask if I am tired.
Love, in that ecosystem, felt entirely transactional.
I am fiercely, unapologetically protective of my peace now. And for a long time, the only way I knew how to protect it was through anger.
I think I resented them for years. Society tells women that we must always forgive our families, that holding onto anger is bad, that we should just turn the other cheek. But burying your anger doesn’t kill it; it just plants it in your bones. So I let myself be angry. I let myself feel the sheer injustice of being a child who was not emotionally held. I let myself be pissed off about the empty promises, the transactional check-ins, the sheer lack of curiosity about who I actually am as a person.
I charged straight into the freezing rain of my own resentment.
And something incredible happened in the middle of that storm.
When you stop running from your anger and just stand inside of it, the weather eventually breaks. The ice melts.
I was sitting on my bed tonight, looking at the history of my family, and a sudden, quiet clarity washed over me.
They are not villains.
I am not a victim.
We are just human beings, colliding in the dark.
I had this massive, chest-cracking realization: It is my parents’ first time on earth, too.
When you are a child, you think your parents are gods. You think they have a secret manual to the universe, and if they are failing you, it must be on purpose. But when you become an adult, and especially when you become a mother, the terrifying truth reveals itself. They were just people. Flawed, terrified, unhealed people, carrying the invisible luggage of their own childhoods, trying to figure out how to exist.
My parents were raised in an era and an environment where emotional intelligence did not exist. Survival was the only metric of success. Did you eat today? Yes. Did you sleep under a roof? Yes. Did you go to school? Yes.
To them, that was love. That was the absolute pinnacle of parenting.
They didn’t come to my room when I was crying because no one ever came to their rooms when they were crying. They didn’t ask me how my day was because they were raised in a world where children were seen and not heard, where feelings were a luxury that poor or struggling people simply could not afford to entertain.
People can only give love to the exact extent that they possess it.
You cannot walk up to an empty well, drop a bucket down, and get angry when it comes up filled with dust. The well is not maliciously withholding water from you. The well is just dry.
My mother cannot offer me an emotionally safe vault because she has never known what an emotionally safe vault looks like. My father cannot communicate without it revolving around logistics or money because, for his entire life, his worth as a man was entirely tied to what he could financially provide.
Two things can be absolutely, undeniably true at the exact same time.
It can be true that my parents did the absolute best they could with the tools they were handed.
And it can be true that their best still hurt me.
Both are real. I do not have to minimize my pain to honor their sacrifice, and I do not have to demonize them to validate my own trauma.
Understanding this didn’t magically erase the sting of my graduation day. It doesn’t make that passive-aggressive Ok feel good to read. But it removes the poison from the wound.
I realized that I was draining myself by waiting for an apology in a language they do not even speak. I was waiting for them to suddenly transform into the emotionally fluent, deeply connected parents of my dreams. But that is like waiting for a storm to suddenly turn into sunshine. It violates the laws of nature.
So, I accept them exactly as they are.
I accept that we will never have deep, philosophical conversations about my inner world. I accept that our phone calls will be brief, logistical, and sometimes draining. I accept that I have to build boundaries to protect my own nervous system from their expectations.
But I also release the resentment.
I am a grown woman. I am a mother. I am building a business, securing my own future, and navigating the chaos of my twenties. I am making mistakes. I am getting things wrong. I am learning how to heal.
And if I want the world to give me grace for stumbling through my first time on earth, I have to extend that exact same grace backward.
My parents are just humans. They are aging. They are tired. They did what they knew how to do.
And now, the pen is in my hand.
I get to write the next chapter of this bloodline. I get to be the cycle-breaker.
The beauty of recognizing the emotional deficit in your childhood is that you get to consciously engineer a surplus for your own child.
My son will never have to wonder if his emotions are an inconvenience. He will never have to sit in a room, crying alone, wondering if his mother hears him. He is going to know that my vault is permanently open. He is going to know that love in our house is not transactional. It is not tied to a paycheck, or a graduation, or a perfectly executed performance. It is just his birthright.
And to give him that, I have to be brutally focused on my own expansion.
I cannot change the past, but I have absolute authority over the future.
I sit here tonight, writing my way through the residual wind of the storm, and my vision for my business and my life has never been clearer.
I want cash flow so massive, so consistent, and so undeniable that the concept of survival mode becomes a distant, faded memory. I want profits that build a fortress of softness. I want to generate a level of wealth that entirely insulates my son and me from the chaos of the world.
I want to be so completely saturated in my own abundance that the triggers of the past lose their grip on my chest.
I am charging the storm.
It was loud for a long time. The wind howled. The realization that you are fundamentally responsible for your own emotional rescue is a terrifying lightning strike.
But I walked straight through it. I named the betrayals. I honored my anger. I looked at the ghosts, the empty wells, and the flawed humans who raised me, and I finally made peace with the math of it all.
I can see the edge of the clouds now.
I can see the breakthrough coming. I can see the financial overflow, the unbothered peace, the absolute sovereignty of a woman who stopped waiting for someone else to build her a shelter and started laying the bricks herself.
Let the rain fall. Let the past be the past.
I went through the storm. And standing here on the other side, looking at the quiet, beautiful life I am building, I have never felt more free.
