Hey you,

Welcome to the 13th edition of The Life You Want.

Every edition will challenge what you’ve heard.


Enough yapping, lets jump in.

A few days ago, I went to my grandparents’ house.

And when I met my grandmother, something struck me.

She was mature, yes.
But also strangely childlike.

Not childish.
Not careless.

Free.

She says what she wants.
Does what she wants.
Laughs when she feels like it.
Doesn’t negotiate with the room before being herself.

Almost like a newborn.

Except, of course, she wouldn’t do anything obviously bad.
No murder or chaos or setting things on fire haha.

That’s the difference.

A child is free because they don’t know.
She is free because she does.

And that’s when it hit me.

This wasn’t innocence from ignorance.
This was innocence reclaimed.

She had worked through her trauma.

Now before you roll your eyes — no,
this isn’t another “heal your trauma and you’ll be free” essay.

Stick with me.

Trauma is one of those buzzwords.

Like “energy.”
Like “alignment.”
Like “inner child.”

Powerful at first.
Then beaten to death by overuse.

Everyone throws it around.
Very few people actually understand it.

So let’s strip it down.

Trauma is not the event.

Trauma is what you learned from the event.

Usually when you were young.

Usually when you didn’t have the tools to verify whether that lesson was true.

A child gets shouted at for expressing anger.
The lesson learned isn’t “this person was overwhelmed.”

The lesson becomes: “My emotions are dangerous.”

A child gets abandoned emotionally.
The lesson isn’t “they were unavailable.”

It becomes: “If I depend on people, I’ll get hurt.”

And here’s the key:

Trauma is just a lie that was learned early…
and then generalised to all of life.

Not a small lie either.
A deep one.

The kind you quietly build your personality around.

So yes,
trauma is real.

But it isn’t mystical.

It’s belief.

Very convincing belief.

Now ask the next question.

Why does this even happen?

Why do people “traumatise” us in the first place?

Most of the time, they don’t mean to.

We are born knowing almost nothing.

No rules.
No meaning.
No danger models.

Just one truth:

“I am.”

That’s it.

Children are naïve and innocent.

And part of growing up is losing naïveté.

That part is necessary.

A child who stays naïve forever is unsafe.

Just imagine a child crossing the road while knowing the traffic rules.

But here’s where things go wrong.

Sometimes, in the process of making us less naïve, the people raising us make us less innocent.

They replace innocence with lies.

Not intentionally.
Not maliciously.

They pass down their own unexamined beliefs.

Control disguised as care.
Fear dressed up as wisdom.
Shame presented as discipline.

That’s trauma.

Not losing naïveté.

But losing innocence because truth was replaced with distortion.

You’ve heard this one before.

“Trauma is generational.”
“Trauma lives in cycles.”
“Trauma repeats.”

Another thing propagated endlessly by media.

But let’s look at it cleanly.

If trauma is a lie…

Then a cycle of trauma is just a lie being taught forward.

A parent who believes “the world is unsafe”
teaches caution, fear, and control.

A teacher who believes “authority must not be questioned”
teaches obedience, not thinking.

Not because they’re evil.

Because they think they’re teaching reality.

Children absorb it.
They grow up.
They pass it on.

That’s the cycle.

Not pain transferring magically through blood.

But beliefs moving quietly through behavior.

The tragedy isn’t that trauma exists.

The tragedy is that most people never question the lie.

No.

Because lies can be corrected.

The hard part is this:

You don’t know which lies you’re believing right now.

They are too deeply ingrained, that you don’t even know.

But slowly — through awareness, reflection, friction with life — cracks appear.

You notice patterns.
Reactions that feel too strong.
Fears that don’t match the situation.

And then one day you realize:

“Oh. This wasn’t truth. This was something I learned.”

And the moment a lie is seen clearly…

It loses power.

When you replace it with truth, something strange happens.

You don’t become naïve again.

You become innocent again.

Open.
Grounded.
Present.

Like my grandmother.

Mature — but childlike.

There’s a reason swans show up in myths.

Not as monsters.
Not as heroes.

But as thresholds.

They appear right at the edge of transformation.

When something stops being what it was, but hasn’t yet become what it will be.

A black swan is rare chaos.
An accident.
A rupture.

A purple swan is different.

It’s not randomness crashing into your life.
It’s recognition.

It’s the moment you realize that much of what you call “me” is actually a collection of old conclusions.

Beliefs you didn’t choose.
Lessons you never questioned.
Rules that once kept you safe, but quietly kept you small.

The purple swan appears when you finally see that.

Not as theory.
Not as inspiration.

But as something felt in the body.

“Oh. This is a lie.”

And once that happens, there’s no going back.

Not because your life explodes.
But because your orientation changes.

You stop asking, “How do I survive inside this belief?”

And start asking, “Is this even true?”

That’s the crossing.

That’s the swan moment.

In old stories, seeing a swan wasn’t about beauty.
It was about timing.

It meant you had arrived at a point where innocence could be recovered.
Not by forgetting, but by understanding.

That’s what this is.

From now on, you will start noticing distortions.

In reactions that feel too sharp.
In fears that feel inherited.
In rules that don’t match reality anymore.

And you’ll correct them.

Slowly.
Imperfectly.
But irreversibly.

Here’s my bet.

Take your age.
Cut it in half.

That’s how long it will take to unwind most of the lies you’re living with.

Why do you think people reach this state late in life?

They arrive there accidentally.

Unconsiously.

You just had it consciously.
You met the swan on purpose.

And once you’ve seen it, you can’t pretend the lake is just water anymore.

Something ancient has been marked.
Something has shifted.

From now on, whether you like it or not, your mind will keep searching for truth.

And that’s where courage comes in.

Because courage isn’t fighting the world.

It’s letting go of the lies that once protected you,
and choosing innocence after awareness.

That’s the rarest kind.

Sit with this before you scroll.

Something in you has crossed a line.

That was your purple swan.

Now live like you saw it.

PS. Thank me later for your free purple swan event:))

Please share it to anyone who would benefit from this.

This is probably the most important letter I’ve written

-RT x

Follow me on twitter here.

Until next time :)