An Injury, Not Evidence

I learned early that a house can belong to you and still not feel like home. 

Some of my earliest memories are of weekends when my aunts would visit. Their arrival was always announced before they reached the front door: loud greetings, laughter carrying through the yard, handbags swinging from their arms. The house would suddenly feel alive. Tea would be poured. Pots would be placed on the stove. Chairs would be pulled closer together. The adults would settle into conversation while the children gathered nearby, orbiting the room like small planets around a sun. 

From the outside, it looked like family. 

From the inside, it felt different. 

I remember sitting among my cousins and noticing that we were not treated the same. They were praised for things that were ignored in me. Their mistakes were excused while mine were highlighted. If they spoke confidently, they were clever. If I did the same, I would be cheeky. If they were quiet, they were well-mannered. If I were quiet, there was something wrong with me. 

At first, I thought I was imagining it. 

Children are remarkably loyal to the people who hurt them. We would rather doubt ourselves than believe the adults in our lives are being unfair. So I searched for explanations inside myself. Maybe I wasn’t trying hard enough. Maybe I wasn’t pretty enough. Maybe I wasn’t lovable in the effortless way my cousins seemed to be. 

The comparisons were rarely direct. Sometimes they arrived disguised as jokes. Sometimes they came wrapped in concern. Sometimes they were hidden inside casual comments that adults forgot the moment they spoke them. 

But children don’t forget. 

Children collect words. 

They carry them around for years. 

What adults call teasing often becomes a child’s identity. 

I can still remember sitting in my own living room while laughter erupted around me. Everyone else seemed relaxed. Everyone else seemed to understand the rules of belonging. I would sit there feeling exposed, as though a spotlight had been placed on every flaw I possessed. The room would fill with voices, and I would become increasingly silent. 

No one noticed. 

Or perhaps they noticed and did not understand. 

There is a particular loneliness that comes from being wounded in front of witnesses. It is one thing to be hurt when no one is looking. It is another thing to be hurt in a room full of people and realise nobody is coming to your defence. 

I think that was the beginning of my belief that I had to defend myself against the world alone. 

School offered no refuge. If anything, it confirmed what I was already beginning to believe. Children have an extraordinary ability to identify insecurity in one another. Bullies often sense the wound before the wounded person fully understands it themselves. 

I became an easy target. 

Every insult I received from classmates landed on soil that had already been prepared. Their words did not create my self-hatred; they simply watered it. 

By the time I was old enough to understand what depression was, I had already spent years rehearsing it. 

I lived inside a constant comparison between who I was and who I thought I should be. Everywhere I looked, someone else seemed more worthy. More beautiful. More confident. More accepted. More loved. 

The tragedy is that nobody ever told me that comparison is a game designed to have no winner. There will always be someone who appears to have more. 

A child doesn’t know that. 

A child simply concludes that she is losing. 

I began carrying a sadness far too heavy for my age. Looking back, I am struck by how young I was. Children should be worried about school projects, playground arguments, and what they want to be when they grow up. They should not be lying awake wondering whether the world would miss them if they disappeared. 

Yet that is where I found myself.

I did not necessarily want death. 

What I wanted was relief. 

I wanted relief from the feeling that I was fundamentally defective. 

I wanted relief from the exhausting effort of trying to earn acceptance. 

I wanted relief from waking up each day and feeling as though I had already failed some test everyone else understood. 

The adults around me saw a child who was quiet. Sensitive. Thoughtful. 

What they did not see was how much energy it took to survive being me. 

What they did not see was the negotiation happening inside my mind every day. How do I make myself more acceptable? 

How do I become someone people choose? 

How do I stop being the version of myself that keeps getting rejected? 

The cruellest consequence of emotional wounds is that eventually the people who hurt you no longer need to be present. Their voices move into your head and continue the work for them. 

My aunts would leave. 

The visitors would go home. 

The conversations would end. 

But the criticism remained. 

I carried it with me. 

I became both the prisoner and the prison guard. 

Years later, I can see what the child could not. 

I can see that I was measuring my worth using tools that were never designed to measure human value. I was evaluating myself through the opinions of people who had their own unresolved wounds, biases, disappointments, and limitations. I was allowing temporary comments to become permanent truths.

Most painfully, I had confused the way I was treated with who I was. 

Those are not the same thing. 

The way people treated me reflected their character, their beliefs, their blind spots, and their emotional maturity. It did not determine my value. 

But children do not know that. 

Children assume the world is telling the truth about them. 

If I could sit with that younger version of myself now, I would not tell her to be stronger. She was already carrying more than any child should. 

I would not tell her to forgive. Forgiveness is a journey, not an obligation. I would simply tell her the truth. 

I would tell her that the feeling of inferiority she carries is not evidence. It is an injury. 

I would tell her that being repeatedly diminished by the people around her does not make her small. 

I would tell her that surviving those years required courage she cannot yet recognise. Most of all, I would tell her that she is not difficult to love. 

Because that was the lie at the centre of everything. 

The girl I once was believed that if she could become prettier, smarter, quieter, better, then she would finally deserve the love that seemed so easy for everyone else to receive. 

The woman writing this knows something different. 

Love was never supposed to be earned through suffering. 

Belonging was never supposed to be won through comparison. 

And worth was never something other people had the authority to grant or withhold. The girl I once was spent years asking, What is wrong with me? 

The woman writing this finally understands she should have been asking a different question all along: What happened to me? 

The answer to that question changed everything.

– Kgomotso Tsotetsi