I sat with this story for a long time. Being labeled “rebellious” was never about my behavior — it was about control. When I wouldn’t stay quiet or make myself smaller, the label made it easier for others to avoid accountability. I’ve come to recognize how often that pattern has repeated in my life.

Writing this meant slowing down enough to look at what that label asked of me, and what it cost. By returning to the physical moments where it first took hold, I could finally hear what my body had known all along. Naming it clearly stripped it of its weight. What once confused me no longer does.

This essay is where I practice putting that label to rest.

My parents were young when they got pregnant with my brother—just sixteen. They were eighteen when they had me. We all grew up together in a way.

There was plenty of love in between the survival struggles. It was the early sixties, and these teenagers had two babies by the time they were eighteen. I can’t even imagine the fear and hope they carried as they tried to keep our family together.

As we got older, the cracks grew louder. My parents were living out their own unresolved trauma in real time, right in front of us. Their relationship was both loud and very, very quiet. My brother and I would sit on the landing upstairs, often wondering if it was okay to go downstairs.

These moments were dramatic, emotional, and hard to navigate as little kids. Confusing and mysterious. It became almost like another person in our home—another entity to walk around.

Presence was often painful.

We were the audience. Sit quietly. Watch from the sidelines. Don’t react. Don’t ask questions. Don’t need anything. Everything was fine.

We were learning—of course we were learning.

We were shown, in real time, the instruction manual for rebellion while simultaneously being given rules our teachers couldn’t keep themselves. When that contradiction became too obvious to ignore, when our curiosity was sparked by what we witnessed, when we started recreating patterns no one had named—that’s when we became “rebellious.”

We did what any abandoned kids do—we raised ourselves. We turned to each other, to our friends. I stumbled through puberty and adolescence, making it up as I went, making mistakes—making it worse. To them, it looked like rebellion. To me, it was living invisibility and heartache out loud.

I was thirteen when I found my mother’s suicide notes on the kitchen counter before school. One for my father. One for me. One for my brother.

Her car was gone.

I felt like someone reached inside my chest and twisted so hard I could not breathe. Standing there holding those notes, not knowing if she was alive or dead, I couldn’t speak.

My dad calmly told us to go to school.

What the fuck is going on?

I glanced at my brother, hoping he’d tell me what to do with his eyes.

On the bus to school, I had no idea whether I should cry, scream, laugh, or run. I looked out the window, my mind spinning—and there was my mom, driving past in her black Chevy Monte Carlo.

Did she see me? Did I catch her look at me?

I frantically looked at my brother. He glanced at me, then looked away.

That’s where the numbness took hold. It had been silence—strategic quiet to survive the chaos. But after that day, it became something deeper. A cold resignation.

I was a child.

That is where my rebellion grew. Confusion hardened into pity, then contempt set in. I didn’t have the words for it then.

I numbed myself with all the things grown-ups do to smother and repress emotion—behaviors, quick fixes, temporary highs. I learned how to pretend—and protect myself.

I fucking hate that label rebellious—the implication being we chose rebellion over the confident parenting, peace, and harmony they claimed to provide.

Did I birth this anger on my own?
Did I create it out of thin air?

It took years to unravel. Years of pretending. Mistakes with my own children I can’t undo. Years of trying to understand why I couldn’t stop the patterns even when I could see them forming.

I understand now that we can’t stop patterns learned in survival—not until we understand where they came from and hold them with love, acceptance, and clarity. Not until we can see them clearly enough to choose something different.

There was nothing clear in my self-inflicted numbness.

After years of wading through the mess, learning to put down the ways I protected myself, I can see it now: what was labeled rebellion was my instinctual pushback against dysfunction. My refusal to accept chaos as normal. My insistence on being seen.

That wasn’t defiance.
That was self-preservation.

That was the part of me that knew I deserved better, even when no one else seemed to notice.

After years of repeating learned patterns, I see now that they were passed down not out of intent, but out of survival. The ones I carried, I am learning to let go—in forgiveness for all of our lived experiences.

Now I get to put that label to rest. Not suppressed. Not twisted. Not coming out sideways in destruction. But clear. Intentional. In service of love instead of survival.

This rebellion—the quiet one, the one that chooses healing over hurting—this is the revolution I was always meant to find.

If any part of this story mirrors something in your own life—if you were the quiet kid, the watcher, the one who learned too early how to hold other people’s emotions—I hope you read this gently. You weren’t rebellious. You were surviving.

I sat with this one for several weeks. I am better for having written it.

Deanna