inheritance
You inherited more than you know. Wounds, yes—but also power.
This essay is an invitation to see the line of women behind you, and to recognise the treasure you've been carrying without knowing it.
Listen or Read Below
I come from a line of women. So do you. And what they carry did not disappear when they died, or when they aged or when they handed us over to our own lives.
It moved forward into our mothers, into us, into our bodies. This is not [a] metaphor. This is inheritance.
My great-grandmother, my mother's father's mother, was an herbalist, a psychic, and the breadwinner in her marriage. How she convinced a man of her time to that arrangement is still a mystery to all of us. She never trusted the missionaries. Not their religion, not their promises or their rules. She was considered rebellious, independent, entirely her own person. I never met her, but from the way our family speaks of her, you can tell she left her mark. Not just in stories, but in our bloodline.
My other great-grandmother was resilient in quieter ways. Sweet as honey, yet forged from steel. She fled an abusive husband in the middle of the night. No plan. Just her wits. She built a new life from nothing. She helped the Mau-Mau resistance, and for her courage, she was given a small piece of land where she rebuilt again from scratch. And that's where I met her, hands caked in soil, watchful but tender-eyed.
My grandmother was cunning, intelligent, [and] perceptive. Her presence was so big, it seemed she was doing life a favour by being here. But she wasn't kind. And life wasn't kind to her either. She was shaped by an environment that never reflected who she truly was. And that shaping left marks on her and on us.
My mother dared to dream bigger than what the world offered her. She gave me wings with her choices, her sacrifices, her tenacity. She is generous, sweet, funny, and a little too nice. Generosity and sweetness have their thorns, too much of it, and everyone sees you as a means to an end. She naturally prefers to keep the peace.
Why am I telling you this? Because my story is also yours.
Different women, different eras, different geographies. But the same wounds, the same pressure to carry everything. Stay strong. To not break. To not ask for help. Your body remembers instructions. It was never explicitly given. Be perfect. Be beautiful. Stay strong. Don't rest. Don't need. Don't ask. Endure. Keep going. Sacrifice yourself for survival.
They were passed down in nervous systems. In the way your mother held tension in her shoulders, in the way your grandmother lashed out in anger, in the way generations of women learn to compress themselves to fit spaces that were never built for their full size.
And even though your life looks different from theirs, your body remembers. That's why your system runs on high alert. Why rest feels dangerous. Why asking for help feels like failure. Why your body sometimes feels like it's betraying you- when really it is just overloaded with the weight of a thousand inherited expectations.
You did not arrive in a neutral body. You arrived in a landscape already shaped by what they lived through. Your nervous system, your stress responses, your patterns of bracing and collapsing. Your ways of attaching and protecting. Some of this was seeded before you even took your first breath.
“The body is an archive”
It holds not just your story, but theirs. The fears they couldn't name, the grief they couldn't process, the survival strategies that kept them alive that were never meant to be permanent.
Science is beginning to confirm what women's bodies have always known. Research in epigenetics suggests that trauma can alter gene expression and that these alterations can be passed to subsequent generations. Studies on descendants of survivors showed changed stress responses, shifted cortisol profiles, and metabolic patterns that appear generations later.
This is not fully mapped yet. The mechanisms are still being studied, but the research opens a door that many women have already walked through in their own bodies. The recognition that inheritance is wider than we were taught, and some of what you carry did not start with you.
But here's what I need you to also understand.
You did not only inherit wounds, you [also] inherited power.
The women before you were powerful in ways the world never celebrated. Rebellious. Resilient. Strategic. Tender. They survived things that should have broken them. They rebuilt lives from nothing. They carried what they had to carry. And still found ways to love, to create, to dream. Not perfectly.
“That power is also yours.”
Because no one reflected back to us the beauty contained in our lineages, we fail to see it ourselves. We miss how tenderness has its own beauty, how strategy has its own power, how resilience has its own strength. We fall silent where we should be, giving standing ovations. We overlook what has risen, what has come into fruition despite the labour, despite the hardship. Because we haven't had the language to reframe the gifts. We take them for granted. We don't recognize them as the treasures they are.
Your great-grandmother's stubbornness that you inherited? That's not a flaw. That's survival dressed in armour. Your mother's sweetness that sometimes swallowed her whole? There's medicine in that tenderness, too- when it's not used against you.
You come from women who were powerful.
And that power lives in you.
Whether or not you have been taught to see it.
If inheritance lives in the body, then healing also happens in the body.
Not just in understanding. Not just in insight, but in the flesh, in the nervous system, in the places where the old instructions are still running.
You are the one who gets to metabolise what they could not. Not because it is your burden, not because you owe it to them, but because you have what they did not have: awareness, tools. language, the chance to grieve what they never got to grieve. You can hold what they carried with tenderness. You can honour their survival, and you can also put down what was never yours to keep carrying.
The pattern can end with you not through force, but through understanding compassion, through listening to the body, through grieving what needs to be grieved and releasing what is ready to be released.
“You’re not here to repeat their lives.”
You're here to live yours with the full knowledge of where and from what you come from.
Your body is not the problem. The conditioning is. And when you know where it came from, you can see the line of women standing behind you with all their wounds and all their power. And you can finally begin to make a different choice. Not to reject them, not to blame them, but to thank them for what they carried and to gently, firmly let go of what no longer serves the life you are building.
You are the inheritor, and you're also the one who gets to decide what you pass on.
* Images sourced via Pinterest. All rights belong to the original creators.*