What If the Only Things “Wrong” With the World Are Things We’ve Forgotten—Or Never Knew?

This question didn’t come to me easily. It arrived after a lifetime of trying to make sense of things that made no sense at all.

It arrived after the pain.

The kind of pain that reshapes you at the bone level. The kind that keeps you up at night staring into the dark, asking why.

Why people hurt each other.

Why some children grow up with too little love, too much fear.

Why the ones who are supposed to protect sometimes become the ones we need protection from.

Why our systems—of care, of education, of governance—seem built more to preserve control than to foster connection.

I didn’t grow up untouched by trauma.

I know what it is to carry shame that doesn’t belong to you, to armor yourself in perfection or performance, to survive by becoming what others needed you to be.

I’ve lived through abandonment, through silence, through the insidious erasure of my own knowing.

And still, I rose.

But not by pretending it didn’t happen.

Not by spiritually bypassing or calling it all a “lesson.”

I rose by doing the hard, holy work of remembering.

Remembering the parts of myself I had exiled just to get through the day.

Remembering the tenderness, the rage, the deep well of desire I had buried under “shoulds” and “musts.”

Remembering that I was always whole—even when the world told me otherwise.

And through that process, I began to see something else:

That maybe—just maybe—what’s “wrong” with the world isn’t evil.

It’s forgetting.

Forgetting that we are sacred.

Forgetting that we belong to one another.

Forgetting that the earth is alive and aching for our return.

Forgetting the old ways—how to sit with grief, how to honor joy, how to raise children in community, how to listen to the wisdom in our own bodies.

Or maybe it’s not even forgetting—maybe we were never taught.

Maybe the ones who raised us were doing the best they could with half a map and broken compasses. Maybe they didn’t know how to love themselves, let alone teach us to love ourselves.

Maybe the systems that failed us were built by people who themselves had been severed from wonder, from ritual, from any experience of unconditional care.

And so the question arises:

What becomes possible when we stop trying to fix ourselves or the world, and begin instead to remember?

To remember the wisdom carried in our bloodlines, in the stories of grandmothers, in the dances of ancestors long erased from textbooks.

To remember the child we were before the world got loud, the one who sang to trees and trusted joy.

To remember that no matter how much we’ve lost, the thread is never fully severed.

It waits for us, patiently, in the quiet.

This is not a call to naïveté.

It’s not a denial of the hard, sharp edges of injustice.

It’s not saying that harm doesn’t need to be named, or that systems don’t need to be dismantled.

It’s saying: maybe the way we heal—ourselves and this world—is not by only building something new, but by remembering something ancient.

Something holy.

Something true.

I still carry scars.

But I also carry wisdom.

I carry a map drawn in my own tears.

And if I can ongoingly remember my way home, then maybe others can too.

So I ask, with reverence, with trembling, with hope:

What if the only things “wrong” with the world

are the things we’ve forgotten,

or the things we never knew?

And what if, together, we could begin the sacred work of remembering?