The Lie I Believed: How I Let Go of Ego and Found God

I was raised in a world that didn’t make sense. A world that held sterling silver flatware in one hand and deep, generational trauma in the other.

My mother grew up in a home full of emotional neglect and sharp edges. Her parents were wealthy alcoholics who were emotionally abusive and emotionally absent. She was made to feel like the odd one out, singled out for her appearance, shamed for her weight, and constantly reminded she wasn’t what her family wanted her to be. That pain never softened. It hardened into a chip on her shoulder that she carried until the day she died. And she passed it on to me like an inheritance.

She taught me that the world would never appreciate us. That we were geniuses, just misunderstood and unrecognized. That we were better than everyone else, but also destined to be mistreated by them. It was a contradiction I learned to live with: that I was both exalted and rejected. That I should walk with my chin high and my fists up.

There were four of us kids: two older brothers and an older sister. All of them escaped by their early teens, each finding a way out from the suffocating grip of her illness and control. But I was the youngest. And when the others were gone, I was the one left behind. I bore the full weight of her delusions, her paranoia, and the twisted world she built around us. I understand their need to escape and don’t blame them for surviving, though I wrestled with that for a long time.

We lived in a crumbling old farmhouse with holes in the roof and a dead possum rotting in the back room. The pantry was often empty, but we ate with sterling silver flatware. My mother taught me how to serve proper tea in china cups, even though we didn’t have running water.

We practiced sophistication in squalor.

It was theater. It was survival. It was denial.

A Childhood Without

We had no car. We lived in a small Texas town with barely 1,000 people and no real resources. Limited access to medical or dental care. Limited help. We were poor in every way: financially, emotionally, spiritually.

I ate at school, or often not at all, unless a friend’s family shared their supper with me. I wore my brother’s hand-me-downs or clothes my best friend Leslie gave me. We washed clothes by hand. Electricity and water were sometimes luxuries. The trauma wasn’t just what we lacked. It was the way we were taught to be proud of it - as if the lack made us holier, more enlightened, somehow superior.

My mother had married my father at 21, a cross-country truck driver sixteen years her senior. He brought his own darkness into our home. They divorced when I was about 18 months old, which was a blessing in a lot of ways but I won’t tell that story yet. Left with her, there was no safety, no example of what love was supposed to look like.

What I inherited instead was suspicion. Arrogance. And a deep fear disguised as pride.

The “Ah-Ha” Moment That Changed Everything

For years, I lived as if the world was watching me, judging me, plotting against me. I saw “popular kids” and “normal people” as the enemy. They were shallow. They were sheep. I was different. I was aware.

Except… I wasn’t.

It wasn’t until I got away - physically, emotionally, spiritually - that I had the moment that broke the spell.

“They’re not thinking about me at all.”

No one was plotting against me. No one was whispering my name behind closed doors. They were just living their lives.

I had been at war with shadows.

Where Ego Ends, God Begins

That moment forced me to see how much of my identity was built on ego…….just a quieter kind. Not the loud, boastful kind. The kind that plays the victim, the misunderstood genius, the outsider who’s better than everyone else but hurting more, too.

Covert pride is just as imprisoning as the loud kind.

And when I finally let go of it, when I dropped the act, the armor, the bitterness…

I didn’t fall apart.

I fell into grace.

I met God not as the punisher I had been warned about, but as the loving Father I had always needed. He didn’t care about the tea sets or the scars or the years of false superiority. He cared about me. About my healing. About my freedom.

Breaking the Inheritance

I am not my mother.

I am not the neglected, broken child that felt so alone.
I am not the story she lived or the bitterness she passed down.
I’m not the child in the shack.
I’m not the girl starving but pretending to host a tea party.

I am loved. I am redeemed. I am free.

If you’ve ever believed the lie that being hurt makes you superior, or that being different means being doomed, there is a way out. You don’t have to carry the weight of someone else’s pain forever. You don’t have to wear pride as protection. You don’t have to prove your worth through suffering.

You can stop.
You can heal.
You can be known—not as the outsider, not as the martyr but as the beloved child of God.

-Candice, Raised in Ruin, Redeemed in Love