Chains Woven in Innocence

Childhood is a garden of preordained truths—bright, fragrant, yet bordered by walls invisible until we try to climb beyond them.

We enter the world as a blank slate, and they eagerly write on us—parents, teachers, society at large. Their lessons are well-meaning, but each carries a subtext: “Trust us, for we know the way.” How many of those lessons were maps for a world that no longer exists?

Take obedience, for example. As children, we were taught that compliance is virtue, that following rules leads to reward. But the adult world rewards not obedience but clever disobedience disguised as innovation. The rule-followers become cogs, their lives defined by the machinery they serve, while those who question and disrupt rise above. What happens when the map they gave us leads only to circles?

We were told to seek stability—a career, a home, a predictable life. Yet, in a world that shifts like sand underfoot, stability is a mirage. The ones who thrive are not those clinging to the dream of permanence but those who dance with chaos, adapting, evolving, and shedding their skins when the old one no longer fits. Stability isn’t safe; it’s stagnant. Why didn’t they tell us that? Or did they not know themselves?

Consider the stories they wove about kindness. “Be nice,” they said, as if niceness were armor against betrayal. But niceness without discernment is a beacon for those who exploit. They neglected to teach us boundaries—the quiet strength to say no, the wisdom to choose where our kindness is spent.

Even our understanding of success was skewed. They spoke of achievement as a linear climb—grades to degrees, jobs to promotions, all toward some glittering summit. But success is fractal, messy, and deeply personal. Its path meanders, doubles back, and sometimes falls away entirely. The summit they promised might not even exist. How do we find meaning in a climb that leads nowhere?

But perhaps the most insidious lesson was that of certainty. As children, we craved their assurances: “This is right, that is wrong. This is how it works.” It comforted us, made the chaos bearable. Yet certainty is a cage. The world thrives in ambiguity, in questions unanswered, in truths that contradict. The more we cling to the black-and-white logic of our upbringing, the less equipped we are to navigate the kaleidoscope of adult reality.

We spend our childhoods absorbing their truths and our adulthoods unlearning them. But some lessons refuse to be uprooted; they linger, subtle as a shadow, shaping how we see the world and ourselves.

The question, then, is not whether we were misled. It is whether we have the courage to rewrite the scripts they handed us. To climb the walls of that childhood garden and risk the wild unknown beyond.