Echos of Insight

Learning the difference between protection and confinement.

Guidance was the word he loved best.
He said it often, like a blessing—
as if it excused the sharpness of his voice
or the weight of his rules.

But what he called guidance was really control—
a leash disguised as protection,
a lecture delivered as love.

I was taught that obedience was trust,
that submission was loyalty,
that respect meant silence.

When I was twelve and echoed his words back at my mother,
he smiled with pride.
When she snapped, “Who put you in charge?”
I felt the sting, but also the truth—
I wasn’t leading; I was parroting.
Even then, control was already threading its way through me.

The cruelty of power is that it rarely names itself.
It hides in proverbs and corrections,
in belts and booming voices,
in the way fear gets rebranded as guidance.
It teaches you to thank the hand that cages you
and to mistrust your own desire for air.

Someone wrote it in a song once:

And I can go anywhere I want,
Anywhere I want, just not home.
And you can aim for my heart, go for blood,
But you would still miss me in your bones.
And I still talk to you (when I’m screaming at the sky),
And when you can’t sleep at night (you hear my stolen lullabies).

It’s the echo of authority that never quite leaves—
the phantom permission slip you keep reaching for,
the invisible leash that tugs when you start to run.

It takes years to separate care from control,
love from domination,
to realize that real guidance
doesn’t shrink you—it expands you.

I used to think boundaries were rebellion.
Now I understand they’re the only way
to love without losing yourself.

And when I write now,
it is always with these questions echoing in the background:
Who is steering—and why?

Because I know too well
what it costs to let someone else
call control by another name.

I saw it in my mother’s sarcasm,
in his booming voice,
in the way no one ever stopped to ask
whether I wanted the role I was playing.