Weight We Pass On

Lena Holloway was known for her quiet brilliance. At thirty-two, she had a reputation as a meticulous architect — someone who could trace lines with surgical precision, as if trying to impose order on a chaotic world. Her designs were clean, controlled, and sharp. Much like Lena herself.

No one questioned why she hated clutter, or why she locked her office door, or why she couldn’t tolerate sudden noise. She had grown so good at surviving that people mistook it for strength.

But Lena’s trauma didn’t disappear. It simply changed rooms.

It lived behind her eyes when someone raised their voice. It curled in her stomach when she made a mistake. It stood behind her when she looked in the mirror, whispering that she was never enough — never safe, never lovable, never real.

She thought she had buried it. And maybe she had, in the same way a tree buries a seed — deep enough to forget, until it grows.

Then came Eli.

He was her intern, twenty-two, earnest, full of awkward talent. He reminded Lena of herself at that age — always trying to prove something, always fearing he wasn't good enough. She saw him as a project: someone she could shape, protect, maybe even fix.

But it wasn’t kindness that drove her. Not really. It was fear.

When Eli made mistakes — minor ones, inevitable ones — Lena reacted with a sharpness that startled even her. A snapped correction. A cold dismissal. A silence that lasted hours. And when Eli tried to talk, to understand what he had done wrong, Lena shut down or shut him out.

Her wounds had become rules, unspoken and rigid.

She didn’t mean to be cruel. She told herself it was mentorship — discipline, high standards. But Eli began to shrink. He double-checked everything. He stopped making suggestions. His laugh faded.

He still admired Lena — that was part of the problem. He believed her criticisms meant he had to work harder. He internalized every silence, every sigh, every glare. What Lena hadn’t healed, he began to carry.

One afternoon, Eli stayed late to fix a draft Lena had torn apart. She returned from a meeting and found him asleep at his desk, face resting on a curled set of blueprints.

For a moment, something inside her cracked.

The exhaustion on his face. The fear in his posture. It was too familiar.

Lena walked back to her office, closed the door, and sat in the dark.

She remembered being fifteen, clutching a math test she’d aced — only for her father to glance at it and say, “Next time, don’t make any errors.” She remembered the broken glass, the slammed doors, the way her mother would flinch before anyone raised their voice — not because she was weak, but because she remembered what came after.

She remembered learning that love was conditional, praise was fleeting, and safety was never promised.

And now, she had passed that on — not with fists, not with screaming, but with the cold sharpness of a woman who thought perfection could protect her.

Lena didn’t cry. But her throat ached in that old familiar way, like she’d swallowed a lifetime of words she never got to say.

The next day, she called Eli into her office.

He looked nervous.

“I owe you an apology,” she began. The words felt foreign — stiff in her mouth. “I’ve been treating you the way I was treated. I thought I was helping you toughen up, but I’ve only been repeating what hurt me.”

Eli blinked. He didn’t know what to say.

“I’m sorry,” she said again. “You didn’t deserve that.”

They sat in silence. It wasn’t comfortable, but it was real.

Eli nodded slowly. “Thank you,” he said, voice thin. “I… I thought maybe I was just bad at this.”

“You’re not,” Lena replied. “I am still learning how not to be afraid of softness.”

It wasn’t the end. Lena still had work to do — with a therapist, with herself, with the wounded younger version of her who still lived in echoes.

But it was a beginning.

Because trauma, when unhealed, doesn’t disappear — it echoes. It can live in a glance, a silence, a reaction. It turns victims into vessels, then into mirrors. And unless we confront it, we risk casting our pain into the lives of others — not as punishment, but as inheritance.

But when we do face it, when we speak it aloud and name it for what it is — it loses its grip.

That day, Lena began to draw different lines. Not to control the world, but to connect to it.

Lines that curved. That softened. That opened.

And somewhere in those new blueprints, healing began.