What is one way you have grown this year?

I realised I couldn’t grow if I didn’t go back to the point where I stopped growing.

The house.

The rooms I closed before they were fully formed.

The memories I abandoned halfway through their becoming.

The doors I shut because I thought survival and healing were the same thing.

For a long time, I thought growth meant distance.

Distance from the house.

Distance from the memories.

Distance from the versions of myself that still wandered those unfinished hallways.

So I left.

I built new rooms elsewhere.

New routines.

New relationships.

New ways of introducing myself to the world.

And for a while, it looked like growth.

The walls were fresh.

The lighting was better.

The furniture matched.

But eventually, cracks began to appear.

At first, I tried to fix them.

I painted over them.

I covered the scratches on the walls with fresh colours and convincing explanations.

I filled the gaps with achievements, distractions, relationships, routines; anything that could keep the structure standing a little longer.

I cleaned obsessively.

Not because the mess was gone, but because cleaning felt easier than asking what had caused it.

If I could make the room look whole, perhaps I wouldn’t have to acknowledge that something underneath it was broken.

So I kept patching.

Kept painting.

Kept rearranging the furniture around the damage.

But eventually, there would be no space left on the canvas

the cracks on the wall could not be hidden anymore

and the mess would become too much to bear.

And then I would leave.

Build a new room

until there was nothing left in me to build.

There was no more space for me to paint; to distract myself with physical pain.

No space for more furniture; to make me believe the house could be finished.

No room left in the bed; no boundaries, no space, no breath.

And that’s when I realised that the cracks weren’t the problem.

They were evidence.

The house wasn’t failing because I wasn’t trying hard enough.

The house was revealing something I had spent years refusing to see.

I wasn’t building from a healthy foundation.

I was building from the same blueprint the house had given me.

The same fears.

The same assumptions.

The same survival mechanisms.

The same lessons scribbled into the margins long before I was old enough to question them.

The house followed me

lived inside me

and etched itself on my skin

until I couldn’t run anymore.

For the first time, I was no longer trying to destroy the painting; I was trying to understand the artist.

So I went back.

Back to the house.

Not to stay there.

Not to glorify it.

Not to become trapped inside it again.

I went back to study the blueprint.

To look carefully at the architecture I had inherited.

The rooms that taught me love was something to earn.

The rooms that taught me silence was safer than honesty.

The rooms that taught me to leave before I could be left.

The rooms that taught me to create stories of imagined softness when reality was too much to bear.

The rooms that taught me that heavy closeness was safety.

Outside the house, those lessons felt normal.

Back inside it, I could finally see the flaws.

I could see where the measurements were wrong.

Where the foundations had shifted.

Where entire walls had been built around fears that no longer belonged to me.

Where a little girl waited outside her home for a father

and carefully observed a mother who wouldn’t speak to her.

And how all these moments shaped her entire world.

And once I saw them, I couldn’t keep building the same way.

Some walls had to come down.

Some rooms had to be redesigned.

Some parts of the blueprint had to be abandoned altogether.

I’m still sitting with it now.

Still tracing old lines with my finger.

Still deciding what stays and what goes.

Still learning the difference between what was given to me and what is actually mine.

So perhaps I didn’t grow in 2026 the way I thought I would.

The way I thought growth looked liked.

I didn’t move further away from the house.

I returned to it. Moved deeper into it.

Back to the place where the building first began.

And stopped.

Growth wasn’t about building something new.

It was about finally having the courage to redraw the blueprint.

Writer’s Note

When people talk about growth, it is often described as moving forward; becoming stronger, wiser, healthier, and happier.

But growth has looked different for me.

I always asked myself if my mother would ever finish building that house. And if she did, would I become finished too.

I thought growth meant leaving the house behind. I thought healing meant distance. That someone else was responsible for it. I thought if I built enough new rooms, I would eventually stop hearing the echoes of the old ones.

And I would eventually live outside of them.

I thought that if mother finished the house, I wouldn’t need to return to it. That it’s old blueprints would fall way, and the rooms built outside of it would reshape it.

What I didn’t realise was that leaving the house was only part of the journey.

I needed the distance.

I needed to experience life outside of it.

I needed to build, fail, love, lose, repeat old patterns, and watch new rooms develop the same cracks before I could understand where those cracks were coming from.

The life I built outside the house gave me something I could never have found inside it: perspective.

It allowed me to see that the blueprint itself was flawed.

And once I saw that, growth stopped being about moving further away.

It became about returning.

Returning to the foundations.

Returning to the places where growth first stopped.

Returning to the tapes paused midway; the memories that were never fully processed and rooms that were closed before they were finished.

Returning to the Fragments.

For me, growth in 2026 was not about becoming someone new.

It was about going back nearly three decades to understand the person I had already become.

The work is not finished.

In many ways, it feels as though I am standing at the very beginning. Sometimes in the middle. Sometimes almost at the end.

But this time, I am not building from a blueprint that was handed to me.

I am learning how to draw my own

using the lessons from outside of the house.