The Ring and the Radio
I was five years old, taking apart a radio on the floor of our house, trying to understand where the sound came from.
Nobody had to teach me to do this. My hands just went there. Padlocks, radios, anything with an inside: I wanted to see the mechanism, not just use the thing.
I preferred primary and high school. The teachers there were able to explain core ideas from the ground up. I don’t think that’s spoon-feeding, if you’re starting at the root.
I did not feel smart, though. I felt the gap between what people said about me and what I experienced about myself, every single day.
University asked me to learn a subject from the middle. Show up, absorb the formula, apply it, move on. If I could not see where something came from, the root, the why, the whole shape of it, I switched off. Completely. Not stubbornness. The mind simply would not move forward without the foundation underneath it.
University was five years of this. I barely attended class, then crammed at the end of each semester at a pace that finally let things click, because compressed time forced the whole picture to arrive at once, instead of in scattered pieces I couldn’t connect.
I graduated with a pass. The lowest passing grade. Five years, and a pass.
I felt it in my body before I felt it in my mind.
A tightening across the chest.
Heat rising into my face.
The specific shame of seeing five years reduced to a single word.
Pass.
Not failure.
Not excellence.
Just enough.
That grade became a ring.
Not a belief I could argue with. A ring: something that wrapped around the actual intelligence and restricted what could move through it.
I could feel it years later in job interviews, in meetings, in rooms where I knew the answer and said something, but still didn’t get the seat at the table, and I blamed my pass for it.
I went back and did a second degree to push the first one down the list. I collected a master’s. I am close to another. For years, I told people about my degrees, to be respected, to be perceived a certain way, but also because some part of me was still trying to loosen the ring by force. More credentials. More proof. Surely enough proof would finally make the ring let go.
It didn’t.
The ring doesn’t respond to evidence. It responds to something else.
The ring was at its tightest during the CNA years.
Two degrees and a master’s, and I was being directed minute by minute through tasks that left no room for the part of me that has always wanted to understand how things work.
Compassion on command.
Schedules.
Checklists.
Routines.
The mind that used to take things apart to understand them had nowhere to go.
My body felt this before I had language for it. The exhaustion was not only physical. It was the specific exhaustion of an intelligence with no outlet, running and running against a wall it could not see but could feel to the core.
In 2024, my body stopped.
That is not a metaphor.
It actually stopped being able to keep going.
What happened after that was the laptop, the writing, the slides, the etymology, and the way everything started connecting. I used to think of that as starting something new.
It wasn’t new.
It was the ring loosening.
The same mind that took apart radios at five years old took apart the I AM Path teachings and found etymology beneath emotion, beneath astrology, beneath the body. The same hands that couldn’t stop opening padlocks couldn’t stop building: a website, a business, slide decks, faster than I could finish them.
That is not a different person showing up. That is the same intelligence, with the ring loose enough to move.
And here is the sensation, in the body, of a ring loosening: it does not feel like triumph. It feels like a held breath finally going out. A held breath you had stopped noticing you were holding, because you had been holding it for so long; it felt like just breathing.
I still feel rings around other things.
The collaborative one: every group still has a flicker of bracing for a fight, even when no one is fighting. I watch people make and keep friends easily, build with them naturally, and feel the ring there too.
The emotional one: I can read exactly what is happening in a room, including inside myself, and still feel the feeling outrun the steadying.
The spiritual one: I watch people channel and wonder if not having that means something about me.
But I know what these are now.
Not absences.
Rings.
And I know what loosening one feels like, because I have felt it happen once already, in the body, as relief, as a breath going out that I didn’t know I was holding.
The five-year-old taking apart the radio was never wrong about herself.
The world just took a long time to build a container shaped like what she actually was.
She is building it now.
One article.
One doodle.
One reflection.
One book.
One app.
One path at a time.
With her own hands. The way she always wanted to.
🤍
When Eva is not building slide decks faster than she can finish them, she is still the five-year-old who wanted to see the inside of the radio. She never stopped. The world just took a while to notice.
She writes about the worth wound, shadow work, and what happens when the intelligence that was always there finally has room to move, one honest essay at a time.
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