Changing our Childhood Story

Reclaiming the Parts of Childhood We Forgot to Carry Forward

When Memory Narrows

When we look back on childhood, many of us don’t remember it as a wide, living landscape. We remember it as a few sharp points.

Being shy.

Feeling different.

Not having many friends.

Moments of discord.

Moments that hurt enough to leave a mark.

Over time, those moments begin to feel like the whole story—not because they were, but because pain is loud. The mind remembers what once demanded protection.

For a long time, when I looked back on my own childhood, what surfaced first was the trauma. The instability. The drinking. The sense that things were unsafe, unpredictable, or emotionally overwhelming. Those memories rose quickly and insistently, as though they were the only truth worth remembering. And for years, I lived inside that narrowed frame, convinced that my past was defined by what fractured rather than what held.

But that was never the whole story.

Why Pain Comes to Dominate the Narrative

The nervous system is designed for survival, not reflection. Experiences that overwhelm, frighten, or destabilize us are encoded deeply because they once required vigilance. Trauma does not simply sit in memory—it reorganizes it.

Moments of danger demand attention. Moments of safety do not.

Gentler experiences—warmth, routine, curiosity, quiet connection—rarely announce themselves as important. They don’t feel urgent because they weren’t threatening. They were lived, not analyzed. And because of that, they are often stored softly, quietly, and eventually overlooked.

Over time, this creates a distorted internal archive:

• Pain feels defining

• Beauty feels incidental

• Identity becomes organized around what went wrong

The story quietly shifts from “This happened to me” to “This is who I am.”

What Quietly Endured

Yet even in childhoods shaped by difficulty, there were moments untouched by threat—moments that rarely get named because they didn’t require survival.

Losing yourself in imagination or play.

Finding comfort in books, music, animals, or nature.

Feeling safest when alone in your inner world.

Being deeply observant, sensitive, or reflective.

Noticing nuance others missed.

Traits like shyness often get misfiled as deficits. But shyness is frequently another word for attunement—the ability to sense, observe, and feel before acting. The quiet child is often the perceptive child. The child with a rich inner world.

These qualities didn’t disappear. They were simply overshadowed when pain became louder.

What Reclamation Actually Means

Reclaiming the overlooked parts of childhood does not mean denying what hurt. It means refusing to let pain have exclusive authorship over the story.

It means recognizing that while some experiences fractured us, others quietly preserved us.

For me, those preserved moments live vividly in memories of my grandma. Every recollection with her carries warmth. Christmases gathered at her home. A steadiness that didn’t require anything from me except presence. Those memories were never chaotic, never unsafe—and precisely because of that, I overlooked them for a long time. They didn’t demand vigilance. They simply existed.

And then there are the small things. My mom making my lunch every day. An ordinary act, repeated so consistently it barely registered at the time. Yet I remember—clearly—the warmth of the brown, red, orange, and yellow Tupperware dishes she used to pair my soup and sandwiches. I remember how good it felt to come home knowing something had been prepared for me.

That quiet consistency mattered more than I understood then. It taught my nervous system something fundamental: that care could be predictable, that being considered did not always come with strings attached, that I did not have to earn every form of being held.

Carrying It Forward

These moments were not background details. They were scaffolding.

They shaped how I sense safety now. How I recognize sincerity. How I trust quiet forms of love. They live on in my attunement, my sensitivity, my ability to notice what others miss. They were never lost—only misclassified as insignificant.

And the same is likely true for you.

Somewhere in your history are moments that did not hurt loudly enough to be remembered first. Moments that didn’t fracture you, but steadied you. They may feel small. Ordinary. Easy to dismiss.

They are not.

Reclaiming them does not change what happened—but it changes who gets to define you now. The shy child becomes the observant one. The lonely child becomes the deeply perceptive one. The quiet moments reveal themselves not as absences, but as evidence of something intact.

Your story is wider than what wounded you.

And the parts that once kept you steady are still available to carry forward.