"You are not broken. You are breaking through." - Alex Myles
I was deeply frustrated with myself. After two years of painstaking recovery from toxic friendships filled with gaslighting and manipulation, I found myself entangled in the same painful cycle with someone new. This time, the issue wasn’t just them—it was me and my choices.
I think we’ve all been there, promising ourselves to break a cycle only to fall back into it. Maybe you vowed to set boundaries, care for your health, or stick to your goals, but somehow, old habits crept back in. I knew better, yet I ignored my intuition, the same inner voice I had learned to trust during my recovery.
Eventually, reality became undeniable, and I ended the relationship. I was proud of standing by my values but frustrated that I let it happen again. My mind raced with questions: Why did I ignore the signs? Why was I here again? And was I beyond help, when it came to making permanent and benevolent changes in my life? I was desperate for an intervention.
To my astonishment, the intervention did come, and in the most unusual way, in the story of the Ugly Duckling!
The Ugly Duckling
The story begins with a mother duck patiently waiting for her eggs to hatch. One by one, they cracked open, revealing lively ducklings—except for one egg, which was larger and lagged behind the others, as if holding a secret of its own.

When it finally did, out came a duckling that looked nothing like the others. They called him the ugly duckling. Though the mother duck loved her unusual child, the ridicule from others wore her down overtime, and one day she told the duckling, “I wish you would just go away.” Heartbroken, the duckling left. It wandered through marshlands, fled from hunters and their guns, and found refuge in a house with an old woman with a hen. But the hen could not get his feathers wet so she made fun of the ugly duckling too. It was apparent. This was also no home for the ugly duckling. When he ran into the wild, he saw those great white birds in the sky, he felt a love for them that he could not understand.
The winter came and the lake froze and the ugly duckling thought he was going to freeze, until a farmer came along and took him home. But inside the home, the children pulled him so he flew up to the ceiling, causing all sorts of things to fall down on the ground. Eventually, the farmer’s wife chased him outside of the house.
Finally, as spring arrived, the duckling stretched his wings and saw his reflection in the water—no longer the awkward duckling, but a graceful swan with extraordinary wings. In awe, he felt the weight of past pain melting away. The great white birds saw him, flew toward him and welcomed him. For the first time, he felt truly seen, not for the ugliness he once believed defined him, but for the beauty that had always been within. He had been one of them all along.
The Call to Authenticity
Like me, the ugly duckling didn’t understand at first, fleeing from one wrong place to another, trying to fit where he didn’t belong. He could not turn the hen into a swan, anymore than he could turn himself into a hen. Can you imagine trying to do so? And yet, there I was, typing desperately trying to get the other person to see me. No wonder it felt impossible and frantic. This pattern of the ugly duckling, going from the wrong home to another brought me questions that had come to be in other shapes and forms before. Do I have the courage and wisdom, to be authentically me, with all of my needs that others may mock or abandon me for? This question was worth deliberating, even if I had come to it at the cost of repeating a hard and painful pattern.
Perhaps you are an artist born in a family of financial analysts, or a risk-taking, daredevil entrepreneur born in a refugee family of academics. Do you dare embrace all that you are, even if it is polarizing? Do you dare be exactly who you are?
The white majestic swan symbolizes our most authentic self.
Freedom Through Patterns

Repeating a pattern is not only expected when it comes to freeing yourself from one, but essential. The story of the ugly duckling was published almost two centuries ago in 1845, so the wisdom of the story has stood the test of time. The desire to get things right propels us toward liberation and self-discovery. Being left to wander in the wilderness alone teaches us to whine less, trust our inner vision, and rely on our intuition. It gives us a perspective that we could never have gained if we hadn’t gone searching for our true people. The truth has set me free and my body agreed. Learning why I had repeated this vicious cycle suddenly slowed down my breathing, my racy mind and brought a gentle calm.
The Internal Mother
The mother duck’s parting words once broke my heart, but now I see them as the voice of the “internal mother.” There was a day when I thought of the world as the most wonderful place, mine to discover. I could not wait to get older, become strong so I could take it on. But the world, through religion, society, culture, and family tells us not to. The world tells us we are better safe than sorry. I yearned for wise, wild and untamed relationships in my life but my internal mother, tired from repeated disappointment, begged me to settle, to stop seeking and just belong. I learned that my job is to empower, fuel and protect the mother inside so she could look after my authentic self.
We must never give up and hold on, because as demonstrated so beautifully in the ugly duckling story, after the winter, spring always comes.
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